Fear of Improvisation (and Clunkers)

October 26, 2009 By

Late Saturday afternoon, I headed out from my apartment to pick up my wife from the airport, about 30 miles away. It was pouring and cold. Traffic was heavy and slow as I caught 395 North into the district. Just as I was about to enter the tunnel that leads into Washington, DC, I heard it: a loud, ugly CLUNK! followed by the jarring tinny racket that tells you that your car is dragging something metallic along. A minute later, I heard the harsh throb of an unmuffled engine. I took the first exit I could, which unfortunately, dumped me right into the heart of Washington, DC. I found a parking spot and stepped out. As I’d suspected, it was my exhaust. A bracket had broken and the exhaust assembly was being dragged along. Here’s a picture of the fix I improvised with my belt, before driving back home. I expect it will hold up fine for the additional mile or so to my repair shop on Monday.

exhaust

The fix, as you can see, is not a particularly clever one. What struck me though, as I thought of it, was how just how long I spent on dumb, unproductive by-the-book “call AAA” thoughts before giving myself permission to figure out this obvious fix. It strikes me that quite often, what holds us back from improvising creative options is not lack of creativity or ingenuity, but a vague fear of improvisation itself. So I poked around the idea a little bit and realized that the fear of improvisation is really the fear of death. Here’s why.

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A Brewing Storm in Psychology

October 2, 2009 By

For several months now, I’ve been noticing a distinct pattern in psychology-beat reporting in major sources of commentary like the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times. I sense that something really big is brewing in psychology. Big enough to deserve the overused phrase “paradigm shift.” Some of the more obvious elements are a renewed focus on longitudinal studies, narrative analysis, and the impact of social network approaches. But overall, I haven’t been able to put the whole picture together, so I thought I’d share a bunch of (excellent) articles that highlight important aspects of what is going on, as well as my preliminary conclusions. This should make for good weekend reading: many of the pieces I am linking to below are in-depth multi-page pieces.  It’ll take me probably another 3-4 months of simmering before I can figure this picture out, but maybe you can beat me to it or help me get there faster.

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The Tao of Frogger

September 28, 2009 By

Remember Frogger? The classic video game that inspired a memorable Seinfeld episode? It struck me that the game illustrates the difference between working smart and various flavors of working stupid. So here is one of my world-renowned cartoon philosophy illustrations (haven’t done one in a while).  Of course, the full-blow version also has crocodiles, turtles and a busy highway, but let’s keep it simple.

frogger

The Allegory of the Stage

September 23, 2009 By

Have you ever taken a deep breath and stepped out on a stage of some sort to perform? Time  slows down. Sounds quiet down and you can actually hear the thudding of your heart. And then, just as suddenly, as your performance starts, your acute sense of self-consciousness is forced to recede. Time speeds back up and the audio gets turned up again.  You are left with a hallucination-like memory of that moment of transition. This experience, which I call the “trigger moment”  is at the heart of the allegory of the stage.

spotlight

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Your Evil Twins and How to Find Them

September 17, 2009 By

Recently a reader emailed me a note: “I just wanted to bring to your radar ‘the pleasures and sorrows of work’ by Alain de Botton, and what you thought of its theses.” Now de Botton (The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, The Consolations of Philosophy, How Proust Can Change Your Life) has been on my radar for a while. I had browsed his books at Barnes and Noble a few times, but always put them down due to strange, sick feelings in my stomach. Thanks to this reader’s gentle nudge, I finally caved and read the first of the three, and managed to figure out why de Botton’s books had made me viscerally uncomfortable at first glance: he is my evil twin. An evil twin is defined as somebody who thinks exactly like you in most ways, but differs in just a few critical ways that end up making all the difference. Think the Batman and the Joker. Here’s why evil twins matter, and how to discover yours.

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Knowing and Caring

September 14, 2009 By

Do you ever idly fantasize about kicking a wine enthusiast in the pants? Wine enthusiasts routinely confuse knowing with caring. They are eager to explain to you that this 1992 Chardonnay has more body while that one has a cleaner finish.  They assume that if only you knew you would start to care. I made up this 3×3 matrix to illustrate the various combinations of knowing and caring about any sort of A-B distinction. Ponder. I will explain.

knowCare

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Time and Money: Separated at Birth?

September 9, 2009 By

An intriguing theme keeps popping up in finance discussions: the relationship between time and money. The best-known line of thinking is the one that Ben Franklin popularized, that time is money. This is the Protestant ethic in three words. Then there is the transactional view that says that time can be traded for money. Let’s call it the Catholic ethic. There is a third view, which I’ll call the Zen ethic. The first two lead to misery. The third, I speculate, does not.

timeMoney

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How to Think Like Hercule Poirot

August 31, 2009 By

Last fall, I spent a long weekend in the Outer Banks region, a few hours south of Washington, DC, reading a collection of Agatha Christie pastiches called Malice Domestic, Volume 1 (now the title of an annual mystery  conference). The summer tourist season was over, and the hordes had moved on to Maine and Vermont to chase the Fall colors. The days were gray, windy, rainy and chilly.  The beach front properties had mostly emptied out, and most of the summer attractions were closed. We had a large three-level beach front house to ourselves, with a porch facing the troubled, ominous sea.

outerbanks

The ocean view from our hotel at Cape Hatteras, Outer Banks

Perfect conditions for bundling up in a blanket with a cup of hot cocoa and a mystery. Reading Malice Domestic was a revelation. None of the included writers even came close to creating Christie-like magic. Which led me to wonder: does Poirot endure because he represents certain truths about how to think effectively, which lesser fictional detectives lack? I think so.

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The Pregnancy Metaphor

August 24, 2009 By

Pregnancy is a rich, if slightly uncomfortable source of metaphors, especially for men.  For example:

  1. The idea of the startup incubator
  2. The idea that product launches are like birth events

The most interesting aspect of pregnancy metaphors is the difference between male and female attitudes towards them.

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The Tragicomic Exasperations of Expertise

August 16, 2009 By

The Dunning-Kruger effect is one of those cleanly stated insights that can at once make you feel relieved and hopeless. It is a cognitive bias which lends confidence to ignorance. Wikipedia compactly describes the effect as follows:

“…people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.” They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average. This leads to a perverse result where people with less competence will rate their ability more highly than people with relatively more competence.

This dry, academic version actually understates both the richness and emotional complexity of what is going on. This richness begins with the subjective consequences of the impasse: the expert is exasperated, while the novice actually feels contemptuous and superior. The situation is stable: the expert gropes for a way to demonstrate the validity of his view at a level the novice can understand and is reduced to sputtering incoherence, which only serves to strengthen the novice’s illusory sense of superiority. Play out the broader effects of this little piece of sketch comedy, and you get all the pathos and pageantry of human society at the grandest scales.

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