Lagrangian and Eulerian Decision-Making

This metaphor is not for everybody, but if it works for you, it will probably be very useful.

Writing Tempo has sparked a lot of  fascinating conversations for me. People either seem to immediately get the decision-making model, or find it completely counter-intuitive and bizarre. Some tell me, “this is exactly how I think, thank you for describing the process clearly.” Others tell me, “nobody could possibly think this way, this is ridiculous.”

In reflecting upon the bimodal responses, it struck me that they were coming from two very different kinds of people. The ones who find the model natural are (predictably) somewhat like me: they do most of their thinking inside their heads with models. The ones who find it unnatural seem to do most of their thinking outside their heads by “watching machines work” as it were. What Myers-Briggs types refer to as the Ti vs. Te distinction (ask your friendly neighborhood Jungian to explain this to you). In terms of concepts in the book, this is the difference between narrative thinkers and situated thinkers.

Narrative thinkers tend to process by following a flow of causation, by keeping an evolving model of it going in their heads. Situationist thinkers focus on the logic of the events flowing through a particular static block of space and time: the one they happen to inhabit at the moment. It’s like following a case as it winds its way through the police investigation, different courts, judges and jurys, versus sitting in a courtroom all day and watching slices of different cases each evolve through a chapter locally.

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War and Nonhuman Agency

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.

There are no men, only artillery, infantry, cavalry. Huge masses and the instruments of their direction. Each member of these masses remembers everything and completely forgets himself. In this there must be and is pleasure…

— Tolstoy

Warfare is about killing people. Everyone seems to acknowledge that normal rules of moral behavior go out the window during war, but also that war is not completely free of rules – there are different codes of conduct that hold, and violating those rules gets will get you in trouble, especially if your side ends up losing. Nobody is quite sure what those rules are, and even less sure how such they are to be enforced. Soldiers are trained to kill, yet expected (at least in the modern era) to keep their killing carefully circumscribed. Killing civilians is a criminal atrocity when done at ground level, but perfectly acceptable when done from above. Or maybe the distinction is not altitude but scale, or whether the killing is authorized by someone who went to college.

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Extrovert-Introvert Fog

Many coastal geographies experience interesting patterns of fog formation when hot and cold currents mix. There are more complicated ways fog forms, but essentially it is a consequence of a collision between two distinct local weather patterns.

It recently struck me that many extrovert-introvert interactions have a similar characteristic. Extroverts gain energy from social interactions. Introverts gain energy from private, secluded thinking. When the two kinds of personalities have been “charging” for a while, they are not just energized, they are also in the grips of serious momentum.

The extrovert’s momentum manifests as wanting to continue social interactions, past the “social charging” event. 

The introvert’s momentum manifests as wanting to continue to think, past the “solitude charging” event.

When the two collide in this stage, the resulting energized communication confusion is really frustrating to experience and hilarious to watch. I call it the extrovert-introvert fog.

The introvert tries to take whatever the extrovert says as more thinking raw material, but the extrovert isn’t interested in that. He or she is interested in continuing to talk, it doesn’t matter about what.

So the extrovert keeps trying to restart the conversation, skipping from topic to topic in an effort to feed the existing momentum. The introvert keeps trying to think about what was said 5 minutes ago and getting the extrovert to shut up while they process.

The interaction usually ends in disengagement with one walking away in frustration, usually the introvert. Otherwise the introvert says something like, “god, will you shut up, and let me think for a moment!” Or the extrovert says something like, “will you pay attention for a moment, you keep tuning out!?”

New York City Meetup on Wednesday, 12th June

The Tristate area Refactorings meetup group is holding its monthly meetup in New York, on Wednesday (the 12th) at Pete’s Tavern at 6:30 PM. The group has been active online and offline for about six months now, thanks to the efforts of Jay Hinton and Adam Hogan, and I am looking forward to finally meeting a few people I’ve only interacted with online so far.

If you can make it, it would be great to see you there. Email me or RSVP on Facebook if you plan to attend. If you do, you’ll also be able to join the associated Facebook group (as with the Bay Area chapter, the group limits membership to people who have met other group members offline).

Venue: Pete’s Tavern, 129 E 18th Street, New York, NY 10003
Time: 6:30 PM

On the Unraveling of Scripts

I am fascinated by scriptlessness: the state of not having a script telling you what to do. I’ve danced around this question a lot in my writing, mostly with reference to the American middle-class life script. But I’ve never really tackled the phenomenon head-on.

I’ll define scripts as collections of learned patterns of behavior that reliably supply both psychological and material resources for survival.  These lend meaning and sustenance to power the script, respectivelyBoth are necessary, and any loss on one front, if not quickly reversed, usually leads to loss on the other, triggering a vicious cycle of increasingly severe script breakdown.

This is the unraveling of scripts. It is the subjective experience of collapsing social and material realities around you, leading eventually to a state of behavioral collapse: scriptlessness. Along the way you encounter all those demons poets like to talk about.

Scripts can collapse for groups and organizations, not just individuals, but let’s start with individuals.

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Aphorisms: Collection 1

For the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with shorter forms of writing, ranging from one-line aphorisms to shorter 100-200 word vignettes. I find I enjoy the challenge of producing interesting prose at these lengths. My writing seems to exhibit a barbell curve of comfort. The nightmare zone for me is between 500 to 1500 words. Curiously enough, that’s the length that dominates both old and new media. I can do less than that or more than that easily, but staying within that range feels like squeezing blood from a rock.

Anyway, for the last two weeks, on Sunday evenings, I’ve been doing a rather silly “aphorism on demand” thing on Facebook where people throw topics at me and I come with aphorisms on the fly. I thought I’d share the output. Thanks to my Facebook buddies for playing. I might keep doing this on a semi-regular basis, so if you are interested in watching the live show, follow me on Facebook.

Here are the results of the first two shows. I am omitting topics and names of people who proposed them. If you tweet any of these, cc @ribbonfarm

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Civilization and the War on Entropy

Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“The ‘abstract’ and the ‘concrete’ from now on would have lives of their own, participating in a perpetual ballroom dance where partners are exchanged promiscuously according to design.”

-Sanford Kwinter

Two threads of discourse dominated twentieth-century urbanism in the United States: the Jane Jacobs-Robert Moses dichotomy and the rise of the suburbs. The former was fundamentally a question of power. Should hyperintelligent master planners decide how cities develop, or should more agency remain at the block level, in the hands of city-dwellers themselves? The questions of how cities should function and whether they should favor vibrant street life or big business, infrastructural megaprojects and automobile throughput all followed from that primary question of power.

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Schleps, Puzzles, and Packages: Solving Complex Problems the Iron Man Way

There is an old joke about cadets in a tank warfare training program with three sessions, on mobility, communications and firepower.

The first instructor, an engine expert, concludes his session with the declaration, “a tank that can shoot and communicate, but not move, is useless.” The next instructor, a radio expert, concludes his session with a similar line, “a tank that can shoot and move, but not communicate, is useless.”

The last instructor, a gunnery expert, finishes his session with the line, “a tank that can move and communicate, but not shoot, is basically a 50-ton portable radio.”

The lesson I draw today from the joke (which I first heard 30 years ago) is this.

Complex problems contain three sub-problems: schlep, puzzle and package.  For a tank, mobility represents the schlep sub-problem (building a vehicle for lugging a big gun around on rough terrain, using known technologies). Firepower represents the puzzle sub-problem (shooting accurately from a fast-moving, wobbling platform). Communication represents the packaging sub-problem (integrating the tank into a battle plan). It took decades to get the solution right, resulting in the modern main battle tank (MBT).

When you solve complex problems right, you are left with three corresponding intangible things of value: an asset, an insight and an aesthetic, which make the solutions both durable and generative (the solutions gradually and intelligently expand to occupy bigger problem spaces, realizing the potential of the original specific solution).

Understanding the interaction of these 3+3 input and output elements can make a big difference to how you attack complex problems. I am going to try and explain using the Iron Man movies.

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The Gervais Principle VI: Children of an Absent God

And so here we are, ready for an assault on our Everest: the mind that lies behind the low-reactor Sociopath face. A face that gazes upon the worlds of Losers and the Clueless with divine inscrutability. It’s certainly been a long climb.

Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | ebook

 

With the resurrection of David Wallace and the ascent of Robert California to a richly undeserved heaven-on-earth, a harem of  young East European women, the crew at The Office teed up their final season, and presented us with our last and biggest challenge. And finally, we are ready to take it on.

Under the creepily steady gaze of Robert California, Jim wilts and chokes. Dwight blusters like a frightened dog, “Stop trying to get into my head!” But ultimately even that courageous Clueless soul cowers.

But you and I, we are going to break through. Our gaze may flinch. We may lose the staring contest with Robert California. We may fail to perturb the preternatural poise of David Wallace. But we will figure out the minds that lie beneath.

As The Office winds its way to a satisfyingly redemptive American series finale this week, the remaining questions in our own little sideshow tent will be answered in deeply unsatisfying and empty ways.  

Here’s a brief recap of the series so far if you need it. Welcome to the finale of the Gervais Principle. [Read more…]

Deliberate Practice versus Immersion

Greg is a 2013 blogging resident, visiting us from his home blog over at On the Spiral. His residency will explore the theme “Individuality and Decision-Making” over several posts.

I think I have finally sorted out my uneasiness with the so-called deliberate practice hypothesis.  Most Tempo readers will be familiar with deliberate practice (hereherehere & here) so I will just offer a quick refresher.  The idea is that abilities that what we commonly perceive as talent are actually the result of painstakingly focused training.  Anders Ericsson, whose research has provided much of the grist for the mill, summarizes deliberate practice as:

activities designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.

I am not the only person to express mixed feelings about the concept.  Others have noted that deliberate practice addresses the known better than the unknown, i.e. it applies to domains requiring mastery better than those requiring creativity.

But what is the alternative?  Without an alternative, criticism carries the scent of sour grapes.

The advocates of deliberate practice generally juxtapose it with either a) belief in the value of innate talent or b) more mundane varieties of accrued experience.  Their claim is that practice counts for more than natural talent, and in order to reach the highest levels of mastery that practice must take a specific form.

My objection to this framing, I realize now, is that deliberate practice is presented as the methodology that is active and therefore earned, while innate talent and non-deliberate(?) practice are portrayed as passive and unearned.  Though never explicitly stated, the normative implications are only thinly veiled in much of the non-academic cheerleading on the subject.   

I think it is a mistake to believe that learning must be deliberate in order to be active or earned.  There is an another alternative that is equally active and equally intentional but not deliberate.  That alternative is immersion.  I mean immersion in the same way it is applied to learning a foreign language…the practice of actively placing yourself in an unfamiliar environment and exposing yourself to novel stimuli. [Read more…]