Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People

November 5, 2014 By

There is an idea that I have been guilty of uncritically parroting and promoting in the past: surround yourself with smarter people. Another popular version is never be the smartest guy in the room. 

Beneath the humblebragging  in both versions (your cut-off for smart is a de facto declaration of “look how smart I am; only Einsteins are worthy of surrounding me, and I understand the things they say!”), there is a basic logical issue: If the smarter people are dumb enough to surround themselves with the likes of you, they are dumber than you, which means they’re smart and you’re dumb. Wait. What?

This is not just a cute paradox, it’s a fatal Godel-level error that crashes the whole smarmy idea. The only way to make it work is hypocrisy: adopt at least a double standard (and preferably an n-standard, where n is the number of people) for “smart.” You’re street-smarter than me. But I’m book-smarter than you. And our friend over there is potato-smarter than both of us. This is the juvenile stuff of folk tales, caper movies and self-consciously different band-of-misfits superhero coalitions.

Yet, there seems to be a germ of truth to the idea.  My alternative to the heuristic, which many of you have heard in off-blog conversations, is that I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop long-term relationships are the ones I surprise regularly. The ones who find me predictable don’t stick around. We’re not talking any old kind of surprise, but non sequiturs. Surprises that you can’t really relate to anything else, and don’t know what to do with. Mind-expanding surprises rather than gap-closing surprises.

Huh?! rather than aha! or ooh!

So smarter isn’t the word here (even though there’s one definition of smart that’s close to “unpredictable”). Neither is different. I can often predict the behavior of smarter and/or different people of both unconventional and conventional types. The trick is to surround yourself with people who are free in ways you’re not. In other words, don’t surround yourself with smarter people. Surround yourself with differently free people.

That’s going to take a bit of work to unpack.

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Crash-Only Thinking

October 29, 2014 By

A few weeks ago, I learned about something called crash-only software  (ht, Robert Greco). This is software that has no normal “start” or “stop” mechanisms. It can only be stopped by crashing it. Often this means unplugging the computer physically. It can only be restarted through some sort of failure-recovery routine, with a hard reboot being the most extreme kind. There’s a whole theory of crash-only software design apparently.

The idea of crash-only design  steelmans a strawman idea of mine that has cropped up in multiple recent posts. In  How To Fall Off the Wagon, I argued that falling-off-the-wagon is the right focal point for understanding self-improvement efforts.   On the Unraveling of Scripts was about why major life transitions are necessarily messy. In The Adjacency Fallacy, I argued that career transitions necessarily involve a period of anomie caused by status and value disorientation. Crash-only is the more powerful version of all those ideas. From a crash-only perspective, falling off the wagon (and getting back on) isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing.

A self-improvement system, or a management model for a business, that doesn’t solve for crash-only constraints isn’t a solution, because it will cost more in crash-recovery effort than the value it creates. Transition management of any sort has to be entirely about crash-only mechanisms.

Software ideas of crash-only design don’t port well to human lives and businesses. So how do you port the thinking?

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Playing Games to Leave Games

October 21, 2014 By

Sam is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog at Moore’s Hand.

When I was a kid I played a lot of chess. On Saturdays my mom and I would get up early and drive an hour to a high school somewhere around Michigan. She would bring a box of old New York Times and read as I played five rounds of chess against other 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds.

The games were typically G/30 or G/45, which means each player had 30 or 45 minutes to make all their moves. If you finished your game early you would have to wait for all the other games to finish and the organizers to calculate the rankings and matchups for the next round.  That process would usually take about an hour, which doesn’t seem like a long time now but of course did at the time.

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I Will Not Rest Until…

October 12, 2014 By

It recently struck me that only one sort of person makes statements of the form I will not rest until X: politicians. Usually in the context of some sort of holy-warrior mission like reforming healthcare, killing all infidels or exacting revenge. It’s a mark of a pursuit motivated by priceless values.

For the rest of us, there are what engineers call duty cycles: patterns of work and rest, uptime and downtime. It’s a pattern of work that doesn’t really include a sense of deadlines at all.

We get to an uptime/downtime understanding of how we’re working by lying to ourselves about the messy nature of effort and relaxation. We do this by marking out arbitrary thresholds that we can consciously detect. Then we lie a little more to club different effort levels together under “work” (in the worst case, calling all effort levels 1 and all relaxation levels 0). In the final stages of habit formation, we ritualize the threshold crossings into start/quit rituals (with warm-up/wind-down rituals before/after that we may or may not count as work).  Once the ritual scaffolding is in place, we allow ourselves to relax, letting the effort range shrink and smoothen into the comfort zone. The approximation created for understanding turns into the legible reality used for managing work . Here’s a picture:

dutycycles

Through such quantization, binary-ization, ritualization and comfort-ization, we get to an approximate and tractable understanding of how we’re working, and when it hardens into a prescription, we get to a passably effective approach to sustaining effort over indefinite periods of times, with predictable outcomes. This is what a habit really is: a ritualized way to sustain work that is not optimal with respect to the work itself, but with respect to the overheads of effort monitoring, feedback, etc. This is why habits have inertia: they are defined in terms of behaviors optimized for minimal meta-work.

When it’s really entrenched, the politician’s lie becomes a sort of truth. When we say something like “I will not rest until,” we really mean “the steady duty cycle will be focused without interruption on this objective.” We don’t really mean we won’t take downtime off. We mean, “this will be top priority within the duty cycle” or possibly “the only priority.” We don’t (and can’t) mean no weekends or evenings.

It’s a fairly harmless, if rather hypocritical/postury little lie.

But this understanding falls apart as we get closer to a deadline. There are times we actually cannot-rest-until something happens because our duty cycle unravels and our mind won’t let us relax until either a new one is in place OR an objective is achieved. Duty cycles are really the mind protecting itself against its own obsessive-compulsive demons. Or to put it another way, your mind is fundamentally atemporal: if time is nature’s way of ensuring everything doesn’t happen at once, OCD is our mind’s way of ignoring time and trying to force everything to happen at once. Duty cycles are how we artificially import a sense of time into our fundamentally atemporal brains. Possibly we are this way because we are fundamentally visual creatures and visual perception is an all-at-once kind of deal. When failure looms, it looms in an all-at-once way. When success is visualized, it springs relatively fully-formed into our minds, with no real hints of how to get there. We try to get around this at an intellectual level by translating time into space (otherwise known as a “having a plan all at once”) but that doesn’t actually work. It merely moves our OCD desire for an all-at-once anxiety-relief pill to a meta-level. Now we can’t rest until the plan is perfect.

As our sense of having a functional duty cycle unravels near a deadline, we are forced to reverse the quantization and binary-ization in order to understand what we’re doing, give up the rituals, and allow anxiety to creep back in, taking us out of our comfort zone. To those with low self-awareness and low tolerance for anxiety, this feels like the world falling apart. To more stoic people, with a more gritty, sisu temperament, this is just a period of learning and leveling-up to a more effective habit.

Perhaps this is why the advice smart people give for this sort of situation is just breathe, take it one day at a time. They key is to get back to living in actual time rather than the horror of spatialized time.

This is sort of an addendum note to this piece and this piece. I’m moving that line of writing from ribbonfarm to the tempo blog.

The Adjacency Fallacy

October 8, 2014 By

Lately, I’ve been having quite a few conversations with people who are trying to reinvent themselves for the new economy. The most common pattern is MBA-types trying to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurial types. The second most common pattern is mid-career types who would normally be moving into either middle management roles trying to reinvent themselves as online lifestyle business types.

It took me a few data points to spot the pattern, but I eventually realized that most people navigating such moves don’t get stuck trying to acquire new, relevant skills. That is actually not quite as hard to do as people think. In many cases, you barely need any skills retraining at all. Often you need no new skills at all. You might even be able to drop some skills and get by with a subset of the skills you had to use before.

The sticking point tends to be something I call the adjacency fallacy: the idea that the roles that suit your personality and soft-skill strengths are likely to be socially adjacent to the one you are leaving behind. “Nearby” roles in some sense.  What sense precisely, we’ll get to.

Adjacency thinking works poorly even if you stick to the old economy. Over the years, we’ve seen the metaphor get increasingly complicated: from the “career ladder” to “lateral moves” to Sheryl Sandberg’s  notion of a “career jungle gym.” The last is a concept so byzantine, merely thinking of it exhausts me to the point of wanting to take a nap.

But adjacency thinking does not work at all if you’re navigating a path from old economy to new economy.

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The Political Hangover of Prohibition

September 30, 2014 By

This is a guest post by Craig Roche, a data scientist and artisanal landlord.

Whiskey is very easy to make.  Farmers used to make it at home using their crops, and Henry Ford designed the Model T to run on home-distilled ethanol.  George Washington distilled 55,000 bottles/year when he retired from being President. Even the mutineers from the Bounty set up a still on Pitcairn Island, and proceeded to get rip-roaringly drunk for weeks at a time. Whiskey is also very cheap to produce;  a bushel of corn ($5 or so), plus 60 cents worth of natural gas can produce 11 liters of automobile-grade ethanol, which, when suitably diluted and aged for drinking purposes, can fill 35 bottles.  Whiskey for human consumption requires higher-quality inputs, more energy for multiple distillations, and additional handling, but even so, decent hooch can be produced for less than $2/bottle. In the 1830s, the equivalent of a bottle of whiskey went for about $5, and Americans responded by guzzling roughly one each week per capita; as young children generally abstained, actual drinkers drank substantially more, all of which was tax-free.

If we assume that the desire to drink, especially among the poor, is an important motivation in peoples’ lives, you would expect alcohol markets to shed light on political conditions across states.

Jack Daniels is the world’s most popular brand of whiskey, and is widely distributed in every state in the US in a standard 750ml container; it is produced fairly close to the mean center of US population, so it should therefore work as a good lens on alcohol politics. Left to a free market, one would reasonably expect that the cost of a retailed bottle would vary with transportation costs, and somewhat with labor rates, or alternatively, that lower-income consumers would spend about the same fraction of their income on Jack Daniels across the USA, or in other words, that the working time per bottle would be constant.

To test this, I researched the cost of a standard bottle of Jack Daniels in each of the states at a high-volume liquor store in the largest city in each state, and compared it to the average wage at the 25th percentile:

laborCost

Figure 1: Labor Cost of Jack Daniels (Image source: Craig Roche)

The results were not what I expected. It turns out that the constant-working-time-per-bottle hypothesis is not even close.

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The Rhythms of Information: Flow-Pacing and Spacetime

September 24, 2014 By

Ryan Tanaka is a blogging resident visiting us from ryan-writer.com. For every article that he writes, Ryan also improvises a live musical piece as means of organizing his ideas. (Below, or here.)

“Flow Pacing” is a phrase used in chemical, sewage, and water facilities in order to describe the treatment methods of its contents, often referring to techniques that inject/extract chemicals and materials into its flow.  Flow pacing can be a very interesting challenge for engineers, because in addition to tracking physical dimensions and working with limitations of resources, you also have to take time into consideration when dealing with its problems and potential solutions.  When the flow of content is non-stop and never ending, you don’t really have the luxury of measuring change in terms of absolutes — it must be introduced gradually, as a series of iterations or applications happening over time.

Ambient-Minimalism

If today’s improv were to be written down in musical notation, it might look something like this.

 

Chlorine injections that flow too slowly leaves the water tainted; too fast, poisonous.  But the solution is never to dump chemicals into the flow as a one-time event: the process is always ongoing, constant and never-ending, so long as the mechanism itself exists.

I think that it makes a lot of sense to think of the internet in this way, since we already tend to conceptualize information networks as though they were servicing liquids of some sort.  Information “delivery” was an oft-used phrase in technical fields in the past, but due to the increased reliability and consistency of today’s information networks, it’s more common now to conceptualize information as “flowing” from one point to another.  We have increasingly begun to see information as being fluid rather than solid, in other words.

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We Have Them Surrounded in Their Tanks

September 17, 2014 By

“We have them surrounded in their tanks.”

So spoke Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the infamous Iraqi Information Minister in the first days of the American invasion. His missives should be an inspiration to public relations personnel everywhere; he was unshakably on-message even as the foundations on which he stood collapsed. His clueless investment in Saddam Hussein’s regime ended swiftly but not poorly (he was reportedly captured and released by the Americans, and is now living in the United Arab Emirates).

Muhammad was a true believer in Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government, and its collapse was inconceivable. In this respect his belief functioned much like that of those apocalypticists whose rapture passes them by, an evaporative cooling effect separating the doubtful from the doubling-down. al-Sahhaf was clueless to be sure, but clueless need not mean unintelligent, nor is the ability to stay on message dependent upon cluelessness.

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Geopolitics for Individuals

September 9, 2014 By

Kartik is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home turf at akkartik.name.

I recently spent a month playing a board game called Diplomacy, and it turned out to be a surprisingly mind-broadening experience. Pretending to be the German Empire before the First World War, exchanging missives all day with the other “great powers” of that time, finalizing troop dispositions before the daily deadline, and then seeing everybody’s moves revealed at once, finding out who lied, who was betrayed, it’s all very dramatic and addictive. It took me a while to realize (rationalize?) why its hold over me was so persistent: it was because it was getting me to grow intellectually as only a few other games have done in my life. Chess taught me to think “a few moves ahead” past the immediate exigencies of any situation. Poker taught me to manage risk when the future is uncertain. Diplomacy is starting to teach me to extend these ideas past the “kiddie pool” of games where you’re playing against coherent opponents. It repeatedly exposes one, like a school of hard knocks, to stable situations that are rendered unstable by the entrance of a new player.

There’s a faint echo of this effect in the chess-like two-player game of Go.

Go position

“Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.” — Trevanian

Learning Go, you repeatedly find yourself in situations that seemed stable, where you were holding your own, that are thrown into disarray by distant parts of the board.

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How to Fall Off the Wagon

September 3, 2014 By

Self-help ideas generally belong to one of three schools of thought, whether the originators realize it or not: values-first, goals-first or process-first. Norman Vincent Peale (Power of Positive Thinking, 1952), Wayne W. Dyer (Erroneous Zones, 1976) and David Allen (GTD, 2002) are the authors of the pioneering mainstream classics of each sub-genre. Those dates are significant: the schools evolved and matured in that order, each building on the last to some extent.

In the process of exploring the question, “what’s the best way to fall off the wagon in each school?” I accidentally created a visualization that turned out to capture a grand-unified-theory of self-improvement. Well, at least a unification of the parts that interest me personally. I knew triangles would eventually be of actual use in my visualization tool-kit.

GpvTriangle

Note that self-help types have a tendency to use people and values interchangeably. It is a very revealing conflation that I might explore someday, but for the moment assume that they are the same thing: that people can be reduced to their virtues and vices. They similarly conflate habits and processes, which is also a revealing conflation I might explore some day. In a business/organizational context, goals and values are generally called visions and missions, but that’s irrelevant for this post.

The arrows represent destabilizing forces that act on each of the three schools.  The green triangle of arrows, going clockwise, represents a pattern of falling off the wagon that feels natural to reformers (those who work within a prevailing social order) and wrong to disruptors (those who work from outside). The red triangle of arrows, going anticlockwise, represents a pattern of falling off the wagon that feels natural to disruptors and wrong to reformers. Equivalently, disruptors are exit people (leaving a social order is a primary problem-solving technique), reformers are voice people (driving reform within a social order is a primary problem-solving technique). If you’re not familiar with the exit versus voice model, check out the Wikipedia page.

Hidden in the diagram, there is actually a pragmatic right answer to the question in the title: continuously, and in a circular fashion. The only question that remains is this: clockwise or anticlockwise? Reformers fall around clockwise, disruptors fall around anticlockwise.
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