Analysis-Paralysis and The Sensemaking Trap

June 18, 2012 By

Analysis-paralysis is when you get into a loop of continuous analysis that prevents you from breaking on through to the “other side” where action can begin. I am beginning to get a handle on the problem, but it is not going to make much sense to you unless you’ve read the book. So this is in the advanced/extra-credit department. Perhaps after some more thought I’ll be able to capture this idea in a simpler way.

In the Double Freytag model of narrative decision-making, analysis-paralysis corresponds to getting stuck in the sense-making phase. Why does this happen?

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Getting Ahead, Getting Along, Getting Away

June 13, 2012 By

Sometimes I think that if I were much more famous, female and in Hollywood instead of the penny theater circuit that is the blogosphere, I’d be Greta Garbo. Constantly insisting that I want to be left alone while at the same time being drawn to a kind of work that is intrinsically public and social. Simultaneously inviting attention and withdrawing from it.

(2017 update: You can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

Which I suppose is why ruminations on the key tensions of being a self-proclaimed introvert, in a role that seems better suited to extroverts, occupies so much bandwidth on this blog. That’s the theme of this third installment in my ongoing series of introductory sequences to ribbonfarm (here are the first two). This is the longest of the sequences, at 21 posts, and also has the most commentary. So here you go. I hope this will be useful to both new and old readers.

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Appreciative versus Manipulative Mental Models

June 11, 2012 By

In my early training in mathematical and computational modeling, an idea was drilled into my head by many teachers: make your models as simple as possible. But somehow, I’ve always resisted this urging. I’ve instinctively gravitated to greater complexity; even intractable complexity. Sometime later in my career, I encountered the slightly more refined principle: start with the simplest model of the problem that you don’t know how to solve. 

Still, I did not like the advice. Even with Einstein’s credibility behind it (“a theory should be as simple as possible, but not too simple”), something seemed wrong about the advice to me.

A few years ago, I found the key clue to the simplicity principle. A work colleague offered the principle: how you model something depends on what you want to do with the model. 

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Towards an Appreciative View of Technology

June 5, 2012 By

Recently I encountered the perfect punchline for my ongoing exploration of technology: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. The timing was perfect, since I’ve been looking for an organizing idea to describe how I understand technology.

(2017 update: you can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

Looking back over the technology-related posts in my archives over the last five years, this technology-is-nature theme pops out clearly, as both a descriptive and normative theme. I don’t mean that in the sense of naive visions of bucolic bliss (though that is certainly an attractive technology design aesthetic) but in the sense of technology as a manifestation of the same deeper lawfulness that creates forests-and-bears nature. Technology at its best allows for the fullest expression of that lawfulness, without narrow human concerns getting in the way.

I will explain the title in a minute but first, here is my technology sequence of 14 posts written over the last five years. The organizing narrative for the sequence comes from this technology-is-nature idea that informs my thinking, whether I am pondering landfills or rusty ships.

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Time Lensing

June 4, 2012 By

We all experience lenses and fun-house mirrors from an early age. Some people were glasses, while others have very acute vision, better than 20/20. Some are colorblind while presumably others are more sensitive to color differences. We know that there are birds and animals that see space very differently from us.

So we are used to the idea that our perception of space depends on how we see. We are used to the idea that if how we see space by default isn’t good enough, we can buy and use telescopes and microscopes to change how we see.

Time is actually a very similar dimension and exhibits exactly the same phenomena, but our intuitions around time are far worse.

For example, if you are angry or sick, time can seem to pass much more slowly than if you are having fun or are healthy. Alcohol generally slows down the perception of time passing (a drunken hour seems longer than a sober one).  Coffee speeds it up.

Various meditative practices or extraordinary situations (like being involved in a major fire, being on a battlefield, etc.) can make time appear to almost stand still, or make hours seem like minutes.

There has been some systematic study of these things (which I’ve referenced in Tempo, such as the early work of Ornstein), but in general, the phenomenology of time perception is largely unstudied. It is just hard to study in laboratory conditions. But it is not hard to study in your own life.

It is useful to think of yourself as going through life with varying kinds of time lenses stuck between your consciousness and the universe. Sometimes you are experiencing time through a microscope or telescope. Sometimes in a convex mirror. You can deliberately put on different types of time glasses for different purposes (coffee, alcohol, music). You can learn mindfulness meditation — the equivalent of getting Lasik surgery for your time-eyes.

The value of gaining some conscious control over your time-perception is that you can experience reality at different levels of resolution, both external reality and your own thoughts. Sometimes it is useful to see all the pores in your time-skin, just as it is useful to see your hair roots in a convex mirror while shaving.

If you are a computer science or information theory geek, you can think of consciousness as having a sort of raw bit-rate, and your time-lens as being able to experience that stream at a certain sampling rate and resolution.

But I am not particularly enamored of the idea of developing strong time-vision for its own sake. So long as I am wearing time-lenses appropriate to the task at hand, I am fine. I don’t need an electron microscope when a hand-held magnifying glass will do.

The Art of Refactored Perception

May 31, 2012 By

When I made up the tagline, experiments in refactored perception, back in 2007, I had no idea how deeply that line would come to define the essence of ribbonfarm. So in this first post in my planned month-long retrospective on five years in the game, I decided to look back on the evolution and gradual deepening of the idea of refactoring perceptions.

(2017 update: you can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

I’ve never attempted an overt characterization of what the phrase means, but over the years, I’ve explored it fairly systematically. This sequence of posts should help you appreciate what I mean by the phrase. I’ve arranged the sequence as a set of fairly natural stages. There is some commentary at the end. Here you go:

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Forged Groups

May 28, 2012 By

In the military, they have a saying: soldiers don’t fight for causes or countries, they fight for the guy next to them. Why would you die for the guy next to you?

It takes a very special kind of extremely cohesive grouping to sustain the kind of punishment that warfare dishes out. There is absolutely no reason to believe that members of a random group, without ties of kinship or race or shared political values for instance, would be willing to die for each other.

It turns out that what makes people willing to die for each other is actually the pressure of war itself. Facing death together means being reborn together.  The metaphor of fire and forging is apt.

The cohesion has to be manufactured. The result is forged (as in metallurgy, not fraud) groups. How do you create forged groups?

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Roundup: January – May 2012

May 24, 2012 By

First off, a big thank you to all those who have signed up to sponsor ribbonfarm in 2012 so far. The total has already hit $2550, about 25% more than last year’s total. This has opened up many more interesting possibilities for activities online and offline, compared to last year. Stay tuned for more on that front.

Here is the roundup of new posts since January. The last roundup can be found here, and from there, if you so desire, you can backtrack through the entire history of this blog, roundup-by-roundup, through approximately 300 posts. I wouldn’t recommend doing that, since there’s more crud in the archives than I like to admit, and because a better option is brewing.

  1. 2012 Reading List, January – June
  2. Seeking Density in the Gonzo Theater
  3. The World is Small and Life is Long
  4. Peak Attention and the Colonization of Subcultures
  5. How to Name Things
  6. The Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region
  7. Refactor Camp 2012: Generativity and Captivity
  8. Glimpses of a Cryptic God
  9. Just Add Water
  10. Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law
  11. Reviewing Refactor Camp 2012
  12. Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch?
  13. How Do You Run Away from Home?
  14. Lawyer Mind, Judge Mind
  15. Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet
  16. Go Deep, Young Man: 2012 Call for Sponsorships
  17. Rediscovering Literacy
  18. Welcome to the Future Nauseous
  19. Discussion Note: Sartre’s Nausea vs. Future Nausea (guest post)

Not counting administrative/meta posts and the sole guest post, I’ve managed 13 real posts so far this year. There has also been plenty of excellent discussion. I am pretty happy with these dozen posts, since a lot of themes that have been evolving over several years appear to be cohering in interesting ways. This was one of the reasons I was able to draw a conceptual map of ribbonfarm and its neighborhood (item 6) and write several pieces that I think capture the learnings from the writing/thinking process I’ve been developing (2, 5, 9 and 16).

Speaking of cohering themes, I am posting this regular biannual round-up a month earlier than usual. This is because I am planning something a little special for June, in the run-up to the fifth anniversary of this blog on July 4th (I started the blog on July 4th 2007).

In June, there will be no new content. Instead, I plan to go back through five years worth of archives and create 4-5 themed summaries of all the good posts, along with some (hopefully helpful) commentary.

For the significant number of people who have started reading this blog relatively recently, this should be helpful, since I back-link extensively through my older stuff (though I only rarely do true series posts, my posts generally make more sense in the context of older ones). Since many new readers attempt to read through the entire archives (otherwise known as the Ribbonfarm Absurdity Marathon), I am hoping to cut down the time necessary for this brave catch-up attempt by somewhere between 50 to 70%. This will probably mean some tough elimination decisions.

It is going to be pretty challenging to partition over 300 posts, averaging 2000-3000 words, with a ton of  cross-referencing, into 4-5 decoupled and linearly sequenced series, but it’s about time. This blog is becoming too much of an illegible slum even for my own slobby, unshaven tastes, so a few guided tours wouldn’t hurt. It won’t be pretty, but I hope machetes will no longer be necessary once I am done.

For those in the US, here’s wishing you a Happy Memorial Day and a good start to your summer.

The Daily Ugly

May 21, 2012 By

The Russian proverb, morning is wiser than evening (MWTE) is one of my favorite ideas about tempo management at the daily level. It makes a more abstract idea (avoid making decisions when you are tired or depressed) more evocative.

MWTE is a simple tempo management heuristic that works for most people, most of the time. If you are a typical sort, and you use it systematically, you’ll slightly improve your decision-making quality by introducing a timing bias. Most of the time. Sometimes, you are smarter at night-time. And there are people who are always wiser in the evening. Good heuristics have this robustness. Even if you proselytize them with no qualifications, on balance you’ll do more good than harm. Really robust heuristics can even handle being rhetorically exaggerated into absolutes (“If you practice MWTE, you will succeed, guaranteed!”). They are also very forgiving: if you execute partially, you get partial results. There is no all-or-nothing effect.

The 24-hour  circadian rhythm is usually the easiest one to work with when you first start to practice tempo management. This is the reason take it one day at a time is such a robust heuristic for tough times. The world of motivational speakers and self-improvement gurus is choked with circadian advice. It is useful to sort out the torrent of circadian tips this world throws at us. A decent classification is good, bad and ugly heuristics. It is the last category that determines the quality of your daily life.

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Discussion Note: Sartre’s Nausea vs. Future Nausea

May 17, 2012 By

This is a guest post by Christina Waters, who writes about art, wine, and food for the greater Bay Area community at christinawaters.com and teaches Critical Theory and wordplay at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In last week’s post I idly wondered about whether the notion of ‘future nausea’ that I talked about had any relationship to the term in the sense of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous 1938 novel, Nausea. Reader Dan L. suggested a connection between Sartre-nausea and the idea of mindfulness, which further intrigued me. Christina, who did her PhD work on Sartre’s theory of the imagination,  posted a comment confirming my suspicion that there was indeed a relationship. So I asked her to do a guest post highlighting some possible connections worth exploring.

So here you go. You may want to read the Wikipedia entry about the book, linked above, for context first.

***

Venkat muses about Sartre’s Nausea seen as a perspective on mindfulness. Perhaps, perhaps not—and we’ll return to that idea a bit later. But nausea is a perspective which makes him (or rather his literary avatar, Roquentin) sick.

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