February 2011 Archives

I'm moving to joshuaspodek.com.

Please check it out there. Hopefully there won't be many hiccups in the process. I may play around with the design. There may be some dead links. I'll do my best to get it stable quickly.

If you accept mainstream ideas of creativity, then your understanding of creativity is holding you back from creating things and being creative. Mainstream views on creativity sell books, movies, magazines, and so forth. They sell over-romanticized myths that, while entertaining, undermine your ability to create things and solve problems.

Let's start with two contradictions to lay bare the counterproductivity in mainstream views.

First, mainstream views value creative, original, so-called outside-the-box thinking, but when push comes to shove, we don't value it in practice. To illustrate, say you have a problem you don't know how to solve. You need someone else to create a solution. It could be anything -- a leaky sink, a managerial issue at work, what to make for dinner, a musical score you want to write. You ask two people for help. One says

I have the most amazing idea. No one has ever thought of it before. Totally outside the box. Completely original. It will blow your mind.

The other says,

I'm experienced in this area. I've solved exactly this problem a hundred times before. The solution I use has worked every single time. It's tried and true.

Mainstream views romanticize the first one, but when the solution matters, you choose the second one. That's why you hire experienced people for high-level jobs and not school children. That's why people with experience are always compensated better than people without it: they know what has worked before and the implement it.

Second, borrowing from Janson's History of Art, consider Manet's Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe:
It's widely recognized as one of the great works of western art, I believe safe to call creative. Here's what's interesting. The composition seems to have been strongly influenced by this detail from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving The Judgement of Paris (c. 1515) after a drawing by Raphael.

The Worst problem In The World is two people with different standards who don't realize their standards differ evaluating each other and acting on their evaluation.

This is not hyperbole. Think of a recent news headline involving conflict. It was probably a variation of The Worst Problem In The World. Many significant conflicts in the world are either solvable or are variations of The Worst Problem In The World. Many major conflicts  in your life with other people are probably also variations on The Worst Problem In The World.

Here's an example: person A is vegetarian and believes eating meat is cruel; person B eats meat and believes people should be free to eat what they want.

A's standard is cruelty. B's is freedom. When A evaluates B, A will find B cruel. If A acts on his or her judgment, B will feel accused of cruelty, which is not even an issue for B. B will find A judgmental, opposed to or ignorant of B's standard (freedom), and will be motivated to retaliate.

If B acts on his or her judgment, B will find A intolerant (opposed to freedom), which is not even an issue for A. A will find B judgmental, opposed to or ignorant of A's standard (cruelty), and will be motivated to retaliate.

Neither can be proved wrong because neither accepts the other's standards. Therefore each will increasingly consider him or herself right and the other wrong, increasingly polarizing the issue.

If their conflict escalates and can find no other common ground, typically each will dig into their positions more strongly, compile evidence supporting his or her case, attack the other personally, consider the other person crazy, and do other things to polarize the conflict. They will feel motivation to be violent and may act on it.

You can change the behavior and belief to any number of topics and the pattern of interaction between the two will be the same because the system is the same. In politics you see it in debates on abortion, gun control, border disputes, tax policy, and so on. In religion you see it in religious debates, religious wars, schisms, and so on. In relationships you see it in the whole men from Mars women from Venus difference, fights -- particularly when one "just doesn't understand" the other, feelings of neglect, cheating, and so on.

When two people have the same standards and disagree, they just refer to the standards, debate, and come to agreement. If they know they have different standards they agree to disagree. They don't have The Worst Problem In The World. They may have problems, but they have paths to resolution. Sometimes -- for example, in the case of access to a scarce resource like food -- both parties may resort to force, but if they both agree on that path to resolve the conflict, it won't linger.

TWPITW™ is different. When they don't agree on standards and have conflicting behavior -- and don't realize they disagree, that is, they believe they have the same standards -- they have no way of coming to agreement and assume the other is crazy, has malevolent intent, both, or worse. And they have no way of resolving the conflict.

For example, many European colonial powers fought border wars in what is now the United States. All agreed fighting was the way to resolve the conflict. Those battles were not The Worst Problem In The World: once they ended, they were rarely brought up again. By comparison, the United States' Civil War had two sets of standards not agreed on by the two sides -- slavery and self-determination -- so it was in instance of The Worst Problem In The World. That war ended, but the conflict remains.

Conflict based on The Worst Problem In The World can last for thousands of years, can destroy relationships, and can make people incredibly bitter. People who can't find ways to resolve conflict through mutually agreed on standards -- that is, those in the midst of The Worst Problem In The World -- will find themselves motivated to use force, insults, passive aggression, and so on. Many act on that motivation.

"Free food tastes better," someone said to me. It rang true. I immediately added the corollary "free alcohol tastes better too."

I thought it resonated with me because I was a graduate student for so long. Then I noticed something at a fancy gallery opening with art selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Normally galleries serve wine, sometimes another alcohol if they have a sponsor. At this opening they were serving cans of Budweiser and everyone -- rich people and social elites -- was drinking it. I'm sure some people love the taste of it, but I'm more sure if these people were at a fancy bar paying for their drinks not a single one of them would order Budweiser.

Yet there they were, happily drinking it, and not ironically.

Free food and alcohol taste better. You don't have to be a poor graduate student to indulge.

Focusing on the positive is great. If it works for you, you can do better.

When something brings you emotional reward, here are two things you can do more than just focusing on it to bring more reward into your life: overindulging in reward and sharing the reward.

Overindulging in reward means if your manager pats you on the back and you feel good about it, find a way to feel great about it. If you finished a project and you'd normally feel great for a day about it, find a way to feel great about it for a week.

Overindulging in reward achieves two things. First, reward motivates similar behavior. Bluntly, you will be training yourself to do things you find rewarding. In the long run that means creating an overall lifestyle based on things you like.

Second, since it feels better than average and sometimes you feel worse than average, overindulging lets you parcel out some of the feelings you like to tide you over when you are feeling things you don't like. If today you overindulge in satisfaction, tomorrow, if you get hit with disappointment, you can bring back some of the satisfaction.

Sharing reward means if you get a role in the play you auditioned for, don't keep it to yourself. Tell everyone you did. If you find you love scuba diving, tell everyone how much you love it. Sharing doesn't mean bragging. It's just sharing what brought about feelings you like.

Sharing in reward does two things too. First, it helps you overindulge. Second, by telling people what brings you reward, you motivate them to share those things with you. If you tell everyone you love scuba diving, people who love scuba diving will be more attracted to you. People who could talk to you about scuba diving or something else will preferentially tell you about scuba diving because they know you like it.

People associate and share with you what you share with them. If you're the miserable person at work, they'll share misery with you. If you're the fun person, they'll share fun. If you get work done, they'll share getting things done. No one views you as just one thing, so they'll average what they see.

If you don't deliberately share what's rewarding, they'll still average what they see, only it will be whatever they happen to see, not what you choose to share. Why not choose deliberately?

The converse is also true. If you love going to parties but you share how miserable you are at work, you won't be invited to as many parties. You probably will instead attract other people who are miserable at work and hear how miserable they are. If you talk about the fun you had at parties, you'll be invited to more parties.

Do you feel if you don't deal with difficult things you're denying or avoiding reality? Does that bring you down or make you feel irresponsible? Does that compel you to do things you don't want to? Here's how to make sure you don't. After a conversation last night, my friend said she looked at enjoying life in a whole new way for the better.

Let's start with an analogy. On a corner of Manhattan, dozens of people may pass you in a minute. You could stop and talk to any one of them. It's so diverse, one might be a student, another a dancer, athlete, lawyer, CEO, model, housewife, and so on. If you began a conversation with any about his or her life, you'd get a different view of the city.

You can make New York whatever kind of city you want among  the communities within it you choose to connect to. Personally, I've seen New York as a student city, and entrepreneurial city, an athlete city, an art city, and so on.

All these New Yorks exist simultaneously in parallel, partly interacting, partly independent. You can choose to pick any one and ignore any others. You could know only students and no entrepreneurs, or whatever. Who you bring into your environment doesn't change that the others are all there, you just aren't interacting with them.

Life is more diverse than New York. It has more people and opportunities to connect to. You can choose to interact with any person or act on any of the myriad opportunities you can find.

Not only can you choose to spend time with any one, you have to choose to spend time with some and necessarily have to decline to spend time with the rest. You can live a student life, athlete life, dancer life, singer life, fun life, miserable life, any combination ... whatever you can make of it.

Likewise, any person is more complex than you can observe and process at once. You can observe and connect with any part of anyone else you want. Anyone has the capacity for curiosity, calm, ambition, and so on. It's up to you to choose what part of a person in your life you want to connect with. If you choose to argue with that person, you're choosing not to connect with other parts. You don't and can't connect with everything.

Hopefully you choose based on your values and what emotional reward the choices bring about. You can choose to spend time on things that make you miserable, but you don't have to. Why would you? If it's unnecessary, you don't have to do it. If it's necessary, it doesn't have to cause misery -- only your (mis)understanding of it would.

Since you only live on Earth for a limited time, and since you can only observe and process so much given your limited senses and brainpower, you can never get to everything. Spending time with dancers isn't ignoring or denying lawyers. No one at the end of your life will say you spent too much time having fun or singing or dancing and therefore you have to balance it with doing taxes or washing dishes or being miserable.

Likewise, having fun or learning with someone isn't denying that he or she can be annoying or boring. You only have so much time with him or her.

I plan on experiencing as much as I can in life. I'm starting with the stuff and people I enjoy and learn from and I expect to die before getting to the miserable parts. I'm not losing sleep over missing the misery. They aren't my priorities and I don't have time.

The New York Times wrote yesterday about Eben Moglen, whom I wrote about recently.

"We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now," he said. "What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been."
...
If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.

"It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse," Mr. Moglen said.

By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading "subversive" material.

...
In response to Mr. Moglen's call for help, a group of developers working in a free operating system called Debian have started to organize Freedom Box software. Four students from New York University who heard a talk by Mr. Moglen last year have been building a decentralized social network called Diaspora.
...

"We should make this far better for the people trying to make change than for the people trying to make oppression," Mr. Moglen said. "Being connected works."

If anyone wants to help contribute, please let me know. We can make a difference.

Here's a model for you: think of a baby learning to walk.

No baby learns to walk right the first time. Not even the tenth time. So-called failure for them is not just figuratively painful, it looks physically painful. Yet babies learn to walk. They try and fail. And try and fail. And try and fail. For months they try and fail.

This model alone shows how poorly the popular use of the term failure describes that part of the learning process. Failure is inevitable. Failure teaches. Failure is what experience means. Babies build experience when they fall. That's how they learn to walk so well.

Can you imagine if after one fall a baby said, "Oh well, I tried my hardest. I just can't walk. I'm not the walking type."?

You were one of those babies. Not only did persistence pay off, your persistence paid off. That's how you learned to walk so well. You succeeded in the face of adversity.

I've written before how I like to read the results of the finishers of marathons I run, especially the last and oldest. From the publicly published information, it's the most inspiration you can get. I'm sure it barely scratches the surface of what some athletes overcome to finish, but I look for inspiration where I can. Since I registered for last year's New York City marathon lottery (but didn't get a number), I got the Road Runners Club's magazine with the times from last November's race.

Before starting at the last finishers I notice they list the wheelchair finishers after the runners. I didn't realize there were two divisions where I thought there was one -- wheelchair and handcycle, men's and women's for each. Only a few dozen competed in each. The winners in those divisions always have the fastest times of the whole race -- wheels help going down those hills, which I imagine they tear up. David Weir of Great Britain won the men's wheelchair division in 1:37:29. He was 31, which you'd think was around a peak age to win a marathon, but Masazumi Soejima of Japan was 2 seconds -- 2 seconds!! -- behind him and he was 40 years old. I imagine it was a duel at the end where they both finish unable to talk or function at anything but catching their breath, then hug at realizing how the other helped each to achieve what he never would have alone.

People who watch marathons, whether their first or after many times, routinely cry or choke up. The emotion on display is so raw it's hard to avoid catching it. The event takes such dedication, discipline, effort, focus, and practice -- yet is accessible to anyone. Seeing wheelchair athletes tends to evoke yet more emotions. I can imagine the scene as these two athletes sprinted across the line.

The winning woman in the wheelchair division, Tatyana McFadden of Maryland, was 45 years old -- more than five years older than me. She finished in 2:02:22, six minutes ahead of Christina Ripp of Colorado, fifteen years her junior!

Looking at the handcycle division... Holy cow! The men's winner, Dane Pilon of North Carolina, at 50 years old (!!) outsprinted Arkadiusz Skrzypinksi of Poland by 1 second, finishing at 1:21:23. As in women's wheelchair, DP was fifteen years older than AS. Can you imagine that finish? I wonder how close they were the whole race. Did one catch the other at the end, maybe to win from behind? Did one dominate the whole time, barely keeping his lead as a challenger approached? Were they neck and neck the whole race? I can't think of an unthrilling possibility.

Double wow! The women's handcycle winner was 62, Helene Hines of New York, in 2:02:16. The next after her was Minda Dentler of New York -- 30 years younger and seven minutes later.

Scanning the wheeled competitors, the youngest I see is a 20 year old man -- Neal Cabanting, from Washington DC. The oldest is a 78 year old woman, one Sister Mary Gladys from Connecticut, finishing in 6:20:39. She's double my age.

Oops. Two corrections.

An 18 year old man -- just a kid -- Charles Sweswn from Colombia finished in 2:09:26 in the handcycle division. An amazing early performance.

And an 80 year old woman from New York, Rosalie Ames finished handcycling in 4:28:31, ahead of over a dozen other handcyclers, men and women.

Folks, how is this not inspiring?

Okay, on to the runners.

Among the slower finishers I see a Joy Johnson, 83 years old from California, finishing in 8:04:59, with 26 others finishing behind her, ranging in age from 19 to 67 -- 16 to 64 years younger than her!

The next oldest I see are one 70 year old two or three minutes ahead of her and a few runners in their sixties.

My best time is a respectable 3:51, so let's jump forward and look around there. In particular, it's always nice to beat a round number like four hours. Three runners finished at 3:59:59 -- a 30, a 40, and a 60 year old. If I get to run this year I'll be forty, so there's all the inspiration I need to beat 4 hours.

With staggered starts, it's harder and harder to know your time. For those who don't know, you run with a chip on your shoe that checks when you pass chip readers. In particular, your finishing time doesn't include the time it takes to cross the starting line, which in New York City can take more than a quarter-hour. But the clock at the finish line only shows one time so you need a watch or a good head for math while running to know your time.

When I ran that 3:51 I think the race clock said something over four hours and I was sprinting just to beat four hours. I didn't realize I beat my personal best until they posted my official time. Who knows if these three runners knew they were just under 4 hours.

It's tempting to think they were shooting for great new times, but how much can you tell from just a name and a time? In some ways, the mystery is more intriguing. Did they sprint to beat a round number? Were they running in their tenth marathons and just enjoying themselves? Were they expecting to run sub-3 hour marathons and hurt themselves, barely able to finish? Even watching them finish -- perhaps hundreds per minute when they did -- you can only imagine their stories. They may have crossed the finish line half an hour apart from each other.

Meanwhile four runners crossed at 4:00:00 and another three at 4:00:01. Were they disappointed at just missing beating that round number? Ecstatic to do so well? Just enjoying themselves? Whatever you speculate, if it doesn't apply to them, it applies to one of the other tens of thousands of runners. Marathon runners are diverse in nearly every way you can imagine except one -- none of them shied away from the challenge of what others, and possibly they themselves before doing it, consider a superhuman feat.

I used to wonder why people considered finishing a marathon superhuman or impossible when the contrary evidence of tens of thousands of runners of every physical characteristic finishing in races around the world was overwhelming. Eventually I settled on the explanation that they held on to their belief contrary to overwhelming evidence to protect themselves.

I've written other posts on people not even trying to achieve their potential in some way. I don't understand such a life. Marathon running requires so little you aren't born with -- a pair of shoes, some socks, running shorts, time, and some space are all you need. I guess the wheeled athletes need a chair, which they must already have. I've run marathons next to blind runners, runners with crutches, and so on.

This issue of the magazine featured the Edison Pena, the Chilean miner stuck underground for 69 days, running up to six miles a day in the mine. Apparently when the New York Road Runner's Club heard about him they decided to invite him, perhaps to ride in a pace car or hold the finishing tape. He ran and walked -- finishing in 5:40:51.

Before the race he said about his training "I was going to turn the tables on destiny. I was saying to that mine, 'I can outrun you. I'm going to run until you're just tired and bored of me.' And I did it."

"I wanted to show the world I could do it," he told reporters afterward. "I struggled with myself, with my own pain. But I made it to the finish line."

It's hard to imagine someone having less space than he had. Just goes to show you: one of the few things more confining than being trapped in a mine for 69 days is the confinement of a belief that you can't do it. Someone believing they can't do something they can and want to ... one of the saddest things I can think of.

Back to the other finishers, while flipping back to the runners around 3:00:00, I happened to notice a runner at 3:18:45 -- better than half an hour better than my best time -- one Andre Lacour of France finished... at 70 years old! That pace is just off a 7:30 mile, which is what I ran in college and graduate school when I would run laps of Central Park -- a mere six or twelve miles, less than a quarter or half of what this guy ran. So it's not hauling ass, but it's a great pace. Last year I think I ran a lap at his pace and it was punishing. His training must have been incredible.

I couldn't resist looking him up. I just typed "andre lacour marathon" and it turns out he was the French champion in marathons in 1969, two years before I was born. He trains with a 60 year old. In 2007, he was third in his age group for marathons worldwide. If I read the French of this other article right, he won his age group at 60 in 2000. I think it also says he was a physicist. But that article says the New York City marathon begins in Brooklyn, not Staten Island, so can we trust it?

Now let's zip to the beginning. The winning man, Gebre Gebremarium of Ethiopia, was 26, young to be on the world stage. His time of 2:08:14 meant he averaged faster than five minute miles for the course. I've never run close to a single five minute mile. I'd wager few people ever have. He averaged twenty six of them in a row over big hills and suspension bridges with big climbs. To anyone but a trained sprinter, that's hauling ass. For a long time.

Six minutes after him came a 38 year old, a mere one year younger than me. Then at 2:24:03 came a 40 year old Mexican man. I plan to enter the lottery this year, which would put me at 40 years old. I don't plan to try to finish within an hour of his time. My priorities just aren't the same. But I would like to think about qualifying for Boston. At forty, I would need to run in 3:20 -- thirty minutes faster than my best. I'd need to train more than I ever have (well, when I ran during ultimate seasons I trained more total, but mostly for ultimate, and then I had tournaments within a week before the marathon, which could not have helped my times).

Well, would you look at that. I just realized they separate the listings by sex. Makes sense, but I didn't notice it because there are so many. So the 3:59:59 times were just one sex. The top finishers were just the men.

I've been writing and inspiring myself for a few hours already, though I love browsing through these times, imagining stories for each runner, finding inspiration. Every finisher's story is remarkable -- whether the race was easy for him or her or the biggest challenge he or she has ever overcome. If it's easy, what made it easy, because I guarantee it wasn't that he or she could just get up and run it. A marathon measures not so much innate ability as training. No one can finish a marathon without significant training. So for runners for whom finishing was easy, I can only imagine they loved the training. Many calories burned and much sweat, but relatively less emotional effort required. That's my style of training.

Or was it life-changingly hard? Well, those are the stories we all imagine. Those are the stories that inspire us. If we can endure a grueling marathon, how easily will we be able to handle comparative trivialities like a micromanaging boss or meddlesome roommate?

Before closing, I'll note a separate piece the magazine had for the oldest finisher this year, 90 year old Jon Mendes of Manhattan, who ran and walked for a just-over 9 hour finish. He trains with an 80 year old kid and ran with that guy and his 18 year old grandson. It was his twelfth New York City marathon.

"You've got to have goals in life or you wither away," he told the New York Times. "It's no disgrace to fail, only not to try."

Typical e-book readers today have a few gigabytes of memory, enabling holding thousands of books.

Where did the choice for this amount of memory come from? Am I missing something? What is the value of holding that many books? Even if you were trapped on a desert island you would die before finishing reading them, leaving aside the issue of recharging the battery.

On the face of it you could say you never know when you might want to read a given book, so why not have it available. Many books are available for free, presumably everything in the public domain that someone has taken the time to convert.

How does having all those books available improve your life? Alternatively, if you had 5,000 books available to you and then you lost all of them, or even half, do you think your life would be worse or do you think you'd recover? I'll bet anyone and everyone could recover from the loss. By corollary they wouldn't gain much emotional reward from the gain in the first place.

I'll also bet people who have more than a few dozen books have read a lot of first chapters of those books, fewer second chapters, and almost no complete books. For them, for all the value they place on books, what does it say about their content if they don't finish what the author wrote?

You could say the vendors have to find ways to differentiate themselves and offer greater value for their particular product over competitors, but they communicate a weird message by implying value in the number of books a reader can hold. It implies any one book is not that valuable or else why would you want or need so many other. It implies collections are more valuable than books -- like they are a commodity, as opposed to individual works to be read and reread.

If you want to improve your life, like most I agree books are a great way to do so for all the obvious reasons -- you access others' thoughts and ideas, expand your horizons, learn, and so on. If you expect to improve your life by getting more than a few dozen books, I suspect you misunderstand both what brings emotional reward and the value of a book. I suggest it makes sense to ignore much of the message vendors signal about their own product in evaluating it for its contribution to your life.

I used to think I might be spoiled by having a free public library across the street from my building, but I've come to realize by any measure of volume of media I can think of, we have more than we can do with it. The perspective that thousands of books has value devalues not just individual books, but the ability to enjoy oneself without any outside stimulation (outside of whatever environment you find yourself at any time).

We live in a world of so much media, the more relevant issue to me is not how much more we can get but how much less.

Do you want a better life? The book Predictably Irrational is a great entry point to one, and to my philosophy. It's also a great book in its own right -- informative and well-written. From my perspective it's a great gateway to how to live a better life.

Its title describes its two-part thesis. First, humans react irrationally to many things. Using "irrational" this way presupposes a definition the book implies is ineffective, but it's the usual economic definition -- roughly speaking in one's material interest.

Second, we react predictably. However counter to our interests or otherwise irrational our reactions appear, on average we react the same. He gives many examples from observations and experiment (what a dream psychology experiments seem like from a former particle and astro- physicist's perspective. We used to work in teams of thousands in experiments with billion dollar budgets, and decade or longer time frames -- more like being in an army. He and his handful of graduate students would do things like set up tables of beer in bars for a few nights).

The book is interesting, compelling, and educational. Dan Ariely, as a scientist, responsibly reports his results but not how they can help you change and improve your life.

Here's what I mean. Our reactions being predictable means they are systematic. If they are systematic and predictable, we can bring about the outcomes we want.

What outcomes do we want? A better life, more rewarding emotions... things like that. The ability to improve one's life systematically, not just to hope for the best or to rest one's hopes in outside forces, is one of the best things one can hope for in life. Ariely's book and research suggests it. I think it's a great.

After yesterday's post, I thought of another little rule I made that makes something some people consider difficult into a game. I'm almost embarrassed to share it because of how geeky it is, but it makes something otherwise challenging into fun, or at least a way to make myself a better me.

First, you should know, I love eating food that tastes good and chips are included. I can eat a big bag in one sitting, no problem. But I like to keep myself in good shape and chips have a lot of empty calories. So here's the rule:

I have to take at least three sessions to eat the full bag of chips, counting no more than one session per day. One exception: if someone else eats any, I can eat the bag in two sessions.

Normally I eat about half a bag the first time I get the chips, another third the next day, and the rest (one-sixth, if you were counting) the third day. Sometimes I eat the whole bag less five or six chips in one day -- then almost nothing the next two days. Sometimes when friends are over I'll offer them chips so I can eat more that day.

That's the heart of it. In my mind, instead of trying to avoid eating chips, I'm playing a game with myself to build discipline. Or I'm being more generous than I would be with my friends. Mentally it's easier and I feel better about myself. I'm sure others would think I'm geeky beyond belief, but so what, I'm doing what I want.

Here is a simple way to reduce one type of stress.

I used to get annoyed when people would show up late to meet me. I imagined them disrespecting me and such. One day I made a rule for myself:

Everybody gets fifteen minutes.

That's it. If someone shows up anywhere less than fifteen minutes late, it's fine. I don't ask questions, I don't ask where they were, I don't suggest anything. After practicing the rule enough, I genuinely don't care. It's fine.

Before this rule I might have wondered if I would lose time, people would take more for granted, or other unintended side effects. The contrary has been the case. A huge source of stress and judgment disappeared. My feared unintended consequences never happened, but even if they had, the benefits are worth it. It's like letting go of being right all the time.

In fact, when I shared the rule with someone who works at the David Allen & Company (David wrote Getting Things Done, guru of time management and productivity) she said she was going to implement it for herself.

Continuing this post that our access to reality is limited by our senses and our minds can't comprehend it all, what then do we have in our minds?

We form beliefs or mental models. What is a model? A model is a simplified representation of reality for a purpose. That previous post dealt with the ramifications of models being simplified -- that they are all flawed.

If they are all flawed, what use are they? How do we evaluate them? That's where their being for a purpose comes in.

The only meaningful measure for a model or belief is in how well it serves its purpose. If believing men are from Mars and women are from Venus leads you to have better relationships and a better life, it has value for you. You don't have to believe it absolutely and you can interpret things as you like.

One of my business school professors told me Jack Welch had a leadership model that said leaders were like gardeners. A gardener doesn't grow vegetables -- he or she chooses fertile ground with good sunshine and rain, chooses seeds, plants them, protects them from pests, and keeps weeds out. The plants grow the vegetables. Likewise a leader doesn't produce products and services, a leader chooses a good market, finds people, hires them, protects them from bureaucracy and such. They produce the products and services.

This model is patently false -- people aren't plants! -- but it's unarguably successful by any measure relevant to Jack Welch. I suspect Jack Welch believed he was gardening while he was leading. That doesn't mean he tried to pour water on people during droughts. It means he believed it when it helped and he didn't when he didn't.

Most people evaluate beliefs based on how consistent they are with their version of reality. By that measure Jack Welch's model failed. Far better to achieve your goals than to be right all the time. If you don't know your goals, learn your values and figure them out (more about that in a later post) -- otherwise you can easily work hard and achieve nothing or worse.

Again, the only meaningful measure of a model or belief is how well it achieves its goal.

One measure of something worth doing is if you would ever regret it. I'm making a list of things that no one would ever on their deathbed look back and say "I did X too much."

I doubt anyone looked back at their life and said, "I danced too much," "I sang too much," or "I played with my nieces and nephews too much." Can you add to the list?

No one ever said

• I danced too much
• I sang too much
• I played with my nieces and nephews too much
• I spent too much time outdoors
• I skied too much
• I laughed too much
• I played sports too much
• ...

What others?

The Parsons Class I'm co-teaching this semester has a blog.

So far it just has a few pictures from the zoetropes a few students did. The results from that first assignment were incredible -- tremendous variety of solutions to the various challenges of physical animation devices and animations: materials, sizes, quality versus quick and dirty, colors, contrast, motion, repetition, etc.

I can't wait to see the results of the later projects, which will be substantial efforts.

Correction: There are already many images and animations, I was just blocking javascript. Enjoy the class site!

The freedom for consenting adults to do what they like is as fundamental a freedom as I can think of and the protecting of it one of my most important interests. About once a week I say something like "I'm a big fan of consenting adults doing what they please." I'm not a fan of people preventing consenting adults from doing what they like or a person involving someone who doesn't consent.

I find its purest (or at least most influential and inspiring to me) statement in Henry Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, the re-reading of which on the occasional Martin Luther King's birthday is one of my favorite pastimes, along with the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution. I find centralizing power enables some of the greatest threats to it.

In my day to day life, I think people see my resistance to attempts by one person to impose his or her values on another as how my interest in freedom manifests. Maybe it's through my talking about the people whose actions in this tradition have impressed and inspired me most, like MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela.

I want not just to know about this tradition of freedom, but to contribute to it. I'm writing today because I was just inspired by Eben Moglen's talk on political liberty and free software (the keynote links here) at a free and open source developers' conference in Europe this weekend.

Based on 1) the success of his and his colleague's contributions to freedom (Wikipedia, the Firefox, GNU/Linux operating system, etc), 2) my skills, knowledge, and circle of influence, and 3) proprietary software's contribution to centralizing power, I believe contributing in the areas he talks about my best way to contribute to the tradition. I've written before why I don't like using un-free software. Watch the video of Eben's talk (or several others at the bottom of this page) for more background. If you love freedom you'll love them. It will help if you're geeky.

I don't think people get that my using Linux and GNU is more than anything else an act to contribute to freedom and resist the contrary, but it is. The technical differences between Free Software and proprietary software aren't that important to me. If the software is Free, we can fix any technical issues.

Anyway, I recommend watching some of Eben's talks.

The following statement has become a personal guideline since I first came up with it. It's served me well.

Don't look for blame but take responsibility for making things better to the extent you can.

You can always find someone to blame if you want. Blame is fundamentally about the past, which you can't change, and judgmental, which repels people. But the main issue is that when you blame someone else for your situation you reinforce a belief that their influence on your life is greater than yours, likely in a situation you consider important. We usually blame people for things that affect us significantly.

Blaming, therefore, disempowers us and and reinforces unrewarding feelings. Guilt is blame directed toward ourselves, usually a self in the past we continue to cling to. The flip side is that blame can help us feel better about things about ourselves we don't like. It let's us say, yes, I'm that way, but it's not my fault.

We can act in the present to bring about futures we want. Responsibility doesn't say anyone is blameless or that anyone didn't contribute to an outcome. Taking responsibility says things are how they are, but doesn't put a priority on the past. It puts a priority on the present, about what you can do now.

Responsibility empowers us. It enables us to improve our lives. It lets us say, how things got this way isn't as important as making things better and I have that ability.

I see every human act lying along an axis with blame toward one side and responsibility to the other. In the direction of blame also lies helplessness and victimhood. In the direction of responsibility also lies self-determination, self-awareness, and being a rock star.

Also, taking responsibility brings emotional reward, which is one of the best things in life. Blame bring indignation, self-righteousness, and the like, which I don't like feeling.

I increasingly choose responsibility over blame, in large part based on this perspective, in particular the phrase above, and it's served me well. I recommend it.

(copying my post to another board where I learned about the movie, slightly out of context)

I saw the movie Gasland about fracking last night at Cooper Union and heard Josh Fox, the guy who created it, speak.

I don't recommend many movies, but I recommend this one. If you can talk to Josh Fox, all the better. I've since watched and read other web pages and videos. I don't claim to be an expert, but I believe I've learned enough to draw reasonable conclusions. I'm open to finding out I'm missing important points.

Debates over Cheney's specific role or if showing the movie is the best way to influence policy are nearly negligible side issues to the issue that fracking is dangerous to huge swaths of populations, the risks are inherent, the harm irreversible on reasonable human time scales, the process to implement it anti-democratic... I could go on. The issue is not complicated for people who breathe air or drink water (unless, perhaps, if they are paid by Halliburton and related companies). To claim gas company's voices were not heard is disingenuous -- they were invited and their refusal to speak was nearly the loudest voice in the movie.

I've heard people say we need more evidence to understand the situation. Anyone who says there isn't enough evidence seems to me either to be ignorant or dishonest. Like I said, I'm open to being shown I'm missing something. Gas industry sources supporting fracking offer counter-arguments and perspectives -- what appears to be largely astroturfing -- several of which have been repeated here. I found them at best far less credible than the sources describing the dangers of fracking. To the extent they seemed credible, refutations like this one diminished that credibility.

I recommend seeing the movie and learning about fracking.

Want a liberating concept?

Our brains and senses are limited. Our ancestors didn't evolve minds to understand everything or senses to sense everything. They evolved them to navigate their environments enough to propagate their genes. That's it. The ones that could had children eventually resulting in us. The ones that couldn't didn't.

Limited senses mean we have limited access to the universe. The observable universe stretches for tens of billions of light years in every direction, yet from my chair I can see a few yards, hear a bit farther ... a bit more from other senses. In my whole life I've observed not much more.

Limited processing power -- that is, brain power -- means of whatever we observe we can remember and understand a fraction. To understand just one other person would require another brain, which we don't have. Yet we interact with dozens of friends and colleagues.

To think we know much of absolute reality (if there is such a thing) is a huge stretch.

Our beliefs and emotions are based not on reality but on our perceptions and other beliefs, each based on incomplete information incompletely remembered and understood. The simplifications introduce biases. We don't know what information was filtered out by our limited perception.

In other words, all our beliefs are flawed and they are our connection to reality. Our physical bodies may interact with our environments, but our mental selves only interact with beliefs, which are inconsistent with reality. We have no idea how much or, for that matter, how significant any flaw might be. Something once trivial can become critical before we know it, and vice versa.

Here's the liberating concept: these flaws and filters are only problems if we think we perceive and understand absolute reality. If you get that you are a step removed, it gives you freedom to influence how you perceive your world.

The ability to influence ones beliefs and facility with it, combined with understanding of how your emotions and motivations work is the foundation to why some people are more or less happy, productive, effective, etc in life.

I'll come back to this topic many times.

"Josh, that rowing machine is the best purchase you've ever made!"

-- Josh's abs

When you think of deciding, do you think of going toward the choice you decide on? I tend to and I think most others do too.

But if deciding is about going toward something we like, why can it be so hard?

The -cide in decide is the same -cide as in pesticide, homicide, and suicide -- from Latin, meaning cut or kill. However much we think about deciding as going toward something we like, our language retains the hard part: cutting off or killing something we like almost as much.

In choices with obvious differences in value -- like Steven Wright's joke: 'I'd rather be rich than stupid" -- you don't hesitate to cut off or kill the choice you don't like. When differences in values are small, you have to cut off or kill something you like.

You have to say no to a lot of good things to have a great life.

Do you or people you know get stuck "winning" arguments only to find they've annoyed or alienated people around them?

It's hard to do anything about it because when people aren't arguing they tend to feel they don't do it -- that only others do. And when they are arguing they're often least open to exiting argument mode into self-reflection mode.

A scene in The Big Lebowski that illustrates the effect perfectly (not on YouTube in good quality, but the audio is here with cool text animation: animated text 1, animated text 2; part of the video in low quality). It's overly dramatic to be funny and has a lot of cursing, but it covers most major points on the counterproductivity of "winning" arguments.

• People debate issues that can have multiple "right" answers depending on your values and perspective, or neither can be proved wrong.
  
• People don't debate issues that can be objectively determined or that can measure or look up in a source both trust.
• Winning a debate in which neither can be proved wrong usually requires something other than reason and rarely ends in agreement.
• Even well-meaning people resort to emotional pressure, violence, threats, name-calling, ad hominem attacks, not listening, yelling, and so on.
• People resent others and themselves for resorting to such tactics.

Do you see the futility of arguing or debating a point where both parties can consider themselves right and the other wrong?

John Goodman's character, Walter, commits most of the problems he could -- which is what makes it funny and genuine. It starts with an unwinnable point: no measure everyone can agree on can determine if Smoky stepped over the line. Leaving aside their counterproductive positional negotiation technique (they didn't read Getting to Yes), Walter's perspective is that everyone should follow his rules. Not everyone agrees, but he insists he is right. The Dude's perspective is that it's a game and rules can be relaxed.

No one talks about the difference in perspective, they just argue they are right within their perspective. In this sense they are all right and no one can prove them wrong.

Walter's insistence on "Am I wrong? ... AM I WRONG???" encapsulates his problem. Seeing the issue as right and wrong sinks him. He's imposing the rightness and wrongness to an issue where they don't apply. That's why he has to ask "Has the whole world gone CRAZY?!?" He lost whatever sense of the value of relationships in favor of rightness.

Most people in a relationship-straining argument insist they are right, an insignificant difference from asking if they are wrong, leading to outcomes like Walter's.

The scene continues after the three videos linked above. The final words of the scene capture the folly of "winning" arguments over communicating productively with people and enjoying life.

WALTER: Well, it's water under the bridge ... am I wrong?

DUDE: No, you're not wrong--

WALTER: Am I wrong!

DUDE: You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole.