constructions in magical thinking
I’ve been in Europe all week and just got done with the European Trend Day conference in Zurich, organized by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. So instead of a regular post, you get the slide-deck for my talk, The Message is the Medium.
The slides are probably going to be a bit cryptic for those unfamiliar with McLuhan’s theory of media, so here are some (hopefully helpful) notes.
Sam is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog at Moore’s Hand.
I grew up in Michigan, the older of two kids, but the second-oldest of all of my cousins. Every Thanksgiving we would drive to Cleveland for our family gathering, where I would hear about my older cousin Amruta’s exploits, and a couple years later, reproduce them.
She went to Penn; I went to Stanford. She spent a year living in India, I spent two. Post-graduation she started in management consulting; three years later, I followed suit.
Our paths led us both to San Francisco, but while Amruta got a J.D. and became a law associate, I quit my consulting job, taught myself to code, and became a programmer.
If you ask Amruta, she’ll say that the common thread of McKinsey and Big Law has been learning to operate in tough workplace environments. Her one-on-ones at McKinsey gave her detailed personality feedback; she was told point-blank to focus on her assertiveness.
Amruta was receiving training about how to effectively implement ideas in an organizational context — engaging with stakeholders, overcoming opposition, and so on.
My main job perk, on the other hand, is being able to sit on a couch all day and think. I give substantive status reports once or twice a week, as opposed to multiple times a day in consulting.
Amruta is a knowledge worker who primarily implements her ideas in an organizational context. I am a knowledge worker whose ideas primarily execute, and replicate, themselves in browsers and on servers.
We’ll call Amruta’s type Directors and my type Authors.
I find that traveling is one of the most disruptive things in my ability to keep my workflows in reasonable order. Over the years, I’ve oscillated between two modes of travel, which I call reboot travel and pause travel.
Reboot travel in the ideal case involves getting to Inbox Zero, clearing all pending time-bound work at your home base, achieving zen mind, and then rebooting into a sort of minimalist “travel mode.”
Pause mode involves doing none of the above, but just taking care of any urgent red-flag home-base items that you are already aware of, mentally hitting “pause” on everything else, and heading out, relying on Internet connectivity to keep you going with only minor interruptions and delays and breakdowns. In pause mode, I don’t even bother to set an out-of-office (OOO) message.
In recent years, I’ve found myself increasingly favoring pause mode. I haven’t used an OOO autoresponder/voicemail message in 5-6 years. It’s slightly risky, since hitting pause without assessing the state of your workflow means you could suddenly find yourself on the hook for doing things you can’t do on the road. But the subset of tasks that fits that description appears to be shrinking every year. If your trips are short, and you can get to a scanner, you’re covered for 99% of cases. The set of things which can’t wait till you get home and require non-digital actions is pretty small. And increasingly, you can live with the cost of delay.
I’ve come to view my workflow as a patient who is always on the brink of a medical emergency and must always be stabilized to some extent to be moved. But the patient has been slowly improving in health over the last couple of decades, thanks to better tools (not to me getting any wiser or better at staying away from the edge of chaos). So it takes less work to stabilize the patient, and the consequences of being sloppy are getting less dangerous.
Until recently, I had never been conceptually attracted to the idea of an afterlife or prior lives, either as thought experiments or as aspirations. And definitely not in any religious sense. This is perhaps because I’ve never been able to imagine interesting versions of those ideas.
What has been piquing my interest over the last year is a particular notion of digital after lives/prior lives based on persistence of memory rather than persistence of agency or identity. Not only is this kind of immortality more feasible than the other two, it is actually more interesting and powerful.
We generally fail to understand the extent to which both our sense of agency and identity are a function of memory. If you could coherently extend memories either forward or backward in time, you would get a different person, but one who might enjoy a weak sort of continuity of awareness with a person (or machine) who has lived before or might live after. Conversely, if you went blind and lost your long-term memories, you might lose elements of your identity, such as your sense of your race or an interest in painting. Mathematician Paul Erdos understood the link between memory and identity:
When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old. Now scientists say it’s four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion… I was asked, `How were the dinosaurs?’ Later, the right answer occurred to me: `You know, I don’t remember, because an old man only remembers the very early years, and the dinosaurs were born yesterday, only a hundred million years ago.'”
Erdos’ version of course, is based on no more than clever wordplay, but I want to consider a serious version: what if you could prosthetically attach to your own mind, the memories of somebody who died on exactly the day you were born, serving as a sort of reincarnation for that person? What if you could capture your own lived experiences as raw and transferable memories that could be carried on by somebody else, or a robot, starting the day you died, thereby achieving a sort of afterlife? Or perhaps live on somewhere in the Internet, changing and evolving?
The most interesting and unexpected consequence of any notion of immortality based on the idea of a living memory, is that notions of heaven and hell make no sense within it.
I grew up with frequent power outages and load-shedding, especially during the summer time. Dark evenings without power were a special time for children. The candle-lit hours on porches and balconies were a strange mix of an ethereal kind of intimacy, beckoning darkness, and thoughts that retreated from both sunlight and electric lights.
You could do nothing useful during those hours. There was no TV or radio. Reading was difficult. Candle-lit meals tended to be either quick, simple affairs whipped up in semi-darkness, or leftovers. Families who turned the blacked-out evenings into family time generally sat out on the porch. Adults would use the time to tell family stories to children. Teenagers and some couples would stroll up and down the street, occasionally stopping to chat with neighbors. Younger kids would run around squealing and playing, seemingly possessed by the strange euphoria-inducing forces leaking in from another world. Or they would huddle together and try to scare each other with ghost stories.
Even back then, having never experienced cold northern climates, I instinctively knew that the Scottish word fey, born of cold foggy highlands, and which I had only encountered in books, was somehow the right word for the charged pre-Monsoon summer air around me.
I posted earlier about discovery-heavy projects that are front-loaded with input firehoses. The complementary kind of project is one that has a lot of messy complexity near the finish line. I call these packaging-heavy projects. An example is writing a book. The hard work from the 0-90% mark is relatively clean and easy to structure.
Then you hit all the packaging work: getting the cover design, figuring out formatting needs (fussy conversions to specific print and electronic formats), uploading stuff to various websites, putting information into databases, and of course, copyediting, proofreading and all the rest of it.
Cooking certain kinds of meals is another example. The actual cooking may be tricky and complex, but limited in behavioral scope. But when you have to do the finishing touches: plating, laying the table, garnishes, serving sequence, keeping stuff warm and coming out at the right time… things can get packaging-heavy.
When there is a whole lot of packaging, it’s worth asking whether you’re really trying to shoehorn an entire distinct project into the tail of the current one. Introverted maker types who dislike marketing often make this mistake: they turn an entire marketing project into a shoehorned set of short-changed activities.
But that pathology aside, packaging-heavy projects are a real thing. I haven’t yet found a good way to navigate packaging tail-end phases effectively. Sometimes you can outsource packaging activities, but other times, you just have to power through all the finishing touches and polishing. It’s a high-risk phase, because a lot of effort can fail or deliver very sub-par returns simply because you forgot a simple finishing touch.
The phrase, strong views, weakly held, has crossed my radar multiple times in the last few months. I didn’t think much about it when I first heard it, beyond noting that it seemed to be almost a tautological piece of good advice. Thinking some more though, I realized two things: the phrase neatly characterizes the first member of my favorite pair of archetypes, the the hedgehog and the fox, and that I am actually much better described by the inverse statement, which describes foxes: weak views, strongly held.
If this seems counterintuitive or paradoxical to you, chances are it is because your understanding of the archetypes actually maps to more commonplace degenerate versions, which I call the weasel and cactus respectively.
True foxes and hedgehogs are complex and relatively rare individuals, not everyday dilettantes or curmudgeons. A quick look at the examples in Isaiah Berlin’s study of the archetypes is enough to establish that: his hedgehogs include Plato and Nietzsche, and his foxes include Shakespeare and Goethe. So neither foxes, nor hedgehogs, nor conflicted and torn mashups thereof such as Tolstoy, conform to simple archetypes.
The difference is that while foxes and hedgehogs are both capable of changing their minds in meaningful ways, weasels and cacti are not. They represent different forms of degeneracy, where a rich way of thinking collapses into an impoverished way of thinking.
I seem to have been dancing around these ideas for about a year now, over the course of three fox/hedgehog talks I did last year, and even a positioning for my consulting practice based on it, but I was missing the clue of the strong views, weakly held phrase.
It took a while to think through, but what I have here is a rough and informal, but relatively complete account of the fox-hedgehog philosophy, that covers most of the things that have been bugging me over the past year. So here goes.
Kartik is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home turf at akkartik.name.
The past hundred years have transformed how we imagine ourselves. Freud catalyzed a greater emphasis on the unconscious. Kahneman and Tversky inspired a lot of research into how our subconscious biases affect day-to-day decision-making. Between those tectonic shifts, our understanding of our selves has been radically overhauled.
Gone is the Cartesian, centralized mind mystically separated from the physical world. In its place we’re left with a schizophrenic brain inextricably bound to the body and, at bottom, nothing but atoms. We’re still struggling to work out the implications of this new perception for different areas of human endeavor. Building effective institutions is one of them.
The term lean has become way too overloaded with complex management ideologies and procedural scaffolding. This is one reason I have come to dislike it. Leanness is a variable in a process optimization model, not an ideology. Cutting the fat is not an unqualified good idea and can actually be dangerous. Lean as ideology often turns into anorexia.
But the core idea is a useful one. In any work process, leanness is simply the amount of work in various stages of completion between input and output. Stuff near the input is raw material inventory, stuff near the middle is parts inventory, and stuff near the output is completed inventory. The sum is Work-In-Progress (WIP), loosely speaking.
I suspect lean became an ideology because of the obesity of 1970s industrial processes in America. Now we’ve come to the other end of the pendulum swing. Anorexia is widespread.
How do you manage leanness without ideology?
We live in an information-rich environment, but our minds are still wired for an environment of information scarcity. It still hasn’t really hit us that in the last 20 years, we’ve experienced a transformation that is as dramatic for our brains as climbing out of the water and learning to breathe air was for our ancient fishy ancestors.
For the past year or so, I seem to have been unconsciously retooling my thinking and writing to operate in an information-rich environment. A big part of such cognitive ret0oling is learning to favor particular terms (or unusual redefinitions of existing terms), and deprecating older terms and meanings that assume information scarcity.
I figure it is time to get more conscious and deliberate about the retooling, so I am sharing the current state of my glossary. Proposals for new terms, or refinements of definitions welcome. I’ll edit this post for a while, and if people find it useful, we can try to figure out a more permanent home for it.
Very little of this is original to me by the way. I’ve credited people where I can, but a lot of this is the outcome of conversations with people I am not at liberty to cite publicly. So you can credit me for any substance here, and blame these invisible collaborators for any bullshit.
Related: I’ve wanted a CMS dedicated to creating shared glossaries for a long time, and even took a half-hearted stab at building one with a friend. I’d enthusiastically support any such effort.
