Protective Weaknesses

Protective Weaknesses- Too stupid to be a good liar

It's nice not to be given power beyond your maturity.

"I'm too stupid to be a good liar."

A friend of mine has a saying, which he delivers quite cheerfully: "I'm too stupid to be a good liar". It's not technically true[1], but it caught my attention. The way he said it expressed two ideas. First, that being a good liar required cunning, planning, and intelligence he did not possess.  And second, that he was grateful for the fact.

I've long accepted that there are many powers and abilities beyond my current maturity, but the idea of being thankful for not having something I'm unprepared for was interesting.

As a person who tends to Want All the Skills, I usually I look at talents others have with a wistful sigh. I wish I had a better memory, catchier comebacks, snazzier fashion sense (in addition to the standard list of more money, time, good looks, etc.). I wish I was more employable, a smarter person, a smoother talker, sweeter singer, could speed read, play the piano, and the list goes on and on. I do try to feel grateful for the good things I do have in life, but I don't often try to feel grateful for the good things I don't yet have.

That initial phrase sparked off the idea of protective weaknesses, that is to say, weaknesses in one area that immunize you against a greater problem.

It's an odd category to think up, but once you start looking for them, you see that protective weaknesses and fail-safes dot human-designed systems. For example, the U.S. government would be much more capable if we didn't split it into different branches that are often at cross-purposes, and insist that certain organizations within it not share information with other organizations. Take away those constraints, and the federal government would be much powerful and efficient. The only drawback would be the federal government would be much more  powerful and efficient.

It's possible to " cripple" your computer or smartphone with programs that block certain websites or internet access on certain times of day, to combat the temptation of technology. The programs occasionally prevent you from accessing useful sites, or turn off your devices at inconvenient times, but they also completely remove the temptation of Youtube, Facebook, and a myriad of internet time-wasters. And for many, the diminished functionality is well worth the chance to focus on work and not waste precious willpower resisting trivial distractions.

And going back to the personal weaknesses level, I've been saved from devouring junk food from the simple fact that I'm too lazy to go to the store when the craving hits. One friend told me being asthmatic makes smoking very unappealing. And I've met more than one person who said they've stayed out of drugs thanks in part to an intense needle phobia.

In these examples, what we're calling "protective weaknesses" function as fail safes  against our worse natures[2]. They impair functionality or power, but in a way that is ultimately protective against abuse or immaturity. Kind of like how we lower voltage of AC current when it gets to our house. Lowering voltage weakens the current, but won't kill you (as easily) if you accidentally get shocked. In this case and many others: weaker is safer, if there is chance of error.

In the Pluto's Republic, Glaucon questions whether any man could keep his virtue if he had a ring of invisibility. Good question. So if we take the inverse of Power Corrupts, do we get Weakness Purifies? I think that would be a bit of a stretch, but I do think that it's preferable to not have power you're unprepared for than to have power you aren't ready for[3].

If I were smart and smooth enough to be an incredibly good liar, lying would be a lot more tempting. I'm glad that I've never gotten good at lying or at cheating, theft etc. Once developed, it's hard to undevelop a skill. And using it, I'd be less responsible for my actions, less kind and upfront with my friends, and better at justifying and hiding my worse tendencies, rather than admitting and correcting them. Without a greater level of maturity than I now possess, I'd probably be worse off with superhuman cunning than without it.

So while I work on maturity I'll try to be more grateful for what I don't have. I've always been glad we don't  go around giving ten-year-olds the car keys; maybe now I can be glad I'm not an incredibly talented [insert profession] or independently wealthy. My weaknesses keep me humble, keep me friendly and empathetic, push me to strive harder, and maybe even teach me the wisdom I need to one day be ready for power I will one day have. I am a student, son, coworker. One day I will be a teacher, father, supervisor. It is almost inevitable that my power/social influence will increase in some areas at least. The only real question is will my maturity keep pace?

I like the idea that I don't have everything right now, and that's ok.

Work on your weakness, but in the right order. Know yourself, and don't forget that the flaws you complain about may not be the ones that are really holding you back.

[1] He's actually very smart. Does that make him a liar?

[2] Built-in weaknesses in crappy printers, trial programs, genetically sterilized hybrid seeds* fall under a different category. Their built-in faults are intended to produce a change of others' actions, rather than prevent a problem. Genetically sterilized hybrid dinosaurs, however...

*GMO crops are not actually modified to be sterile. Monsanto owns the patent on the technique to do so, but they've promised not to use it. Ian Malcolm would just tell everyone not to worry.

[3] Which makes one wonder if we are sufficiently mature to have nuclear weapons? Drones? The Internet? Or unprecedented leisure time and Netflix, for that matter?

World Fog

When I was a lad, I spent many hours on the most realistic simulator I had. The year being 2002 or thereabouts, this meant Simcopter.

Check out the incredible GPS map they gave you

<----------

Our old Toshiba desktop struggled to render even these blocky graphics, so I would frequently pull up the settings menu to tweak the game until it was sufficiently simple for our old PC. It was there that I began to notice the World Fog.

The World Fog was just that, a fog that enveloped the entire world, limiting your visibility from anywhere from a few blocks on a cloudy day or miles[1] on a clear one.

While the fog made it harder to find my way through the city, it injected a certain magic into the game.  Yes, I can't see as many buildings, or the details of the mountains on the far side of the lake, but now I hold my breath as I round the corner, ready to dodge the next skyscraper, spotlight a fleeing criminal or swoop down to put out a fire.

You'd think more details, more pieces and things, would make the world seem more real, but the opposite was true in this case. The fog drastically limited my view of the world, but that very limitation endowed the world with greater suspense-- a sense of mystery and discovery.

Allure of the unknown

The most immersive and engaging fiction often reveals only a small portion of the total created world. Tolkien's Middle Earth is the perfect example. Readers barely glimpse many of the ancient conflicts and heroic epics in that world, but even without knowing the whole story they can feel the weight of world, sense their foundations rooted in the history and fabric of Middle Earth.

In Sabriel, a favorite of mine, Garth Nix paints an intriguing world in the Old Kingdom, but the unexplained corners are the most fascinating. Instead of wrapping all plot points up with a ribbon at the end, he gives enough for a satisfying conclusion and leaves a few major questions half-explained, mysteries with two or three possible solutions, each more intriguing then the last. That mystery of the unknown, the excitement of discovery, the tension of danger-- That is one of the reasons I love to read.

In Real Life

It's a foggy, foggy day

There are World Fogs in real life as well as in fiction, but one that reflects the limits of human knowledge rather than a graphics card. This can be surprisingly easy to forget in an age where what we do know is more comprehensive and better organized than ever before. Every branch of human knowledge-- history, physics, math, technology-- they all have limitations. Some are more clearly defined than others (8 * 6 = 48, vs. exercise is good for you, vs. what are the mediating factors of anxiety?, vs. why does matter exist?).

We don't really know why gravity works on every simultaneous particle in the universe while being so weak. We don't fully understand how behaviors and environments shape gene expression in successive generations. We haven't explored most of the ocean floor. The economy is way too complex for any model to accurately predict. There are billions of things we don't know about our own bodies and brains, including everything from schizophrenia to why the heck we need to spend a third of our lives sleeping.

People often assume that we do completely understand all these things. Why? Because it's more comforting to think so, or because we confuse familiarity or prediction with explanation, or because we think our current models are 100% correct, despite the track record of thousands of years of theories being proved wrong[2] [3].

So when people claim that we know everything there is to know about X, take it with a pinch of salt. Figure out how where the theories falter, or under what conditions those lab experiments where performed. We've learned a lot, true, but there's always an edge on the map. Find the edge, and you'll know better under what parameters that knowledge will remain robust and useful.

So go out and explore

Compared to what we don't know, what we know isn't much. In one way this is a humbling realization. In another it is wonderfully exciting. It is on the edges of the map that we make discoveries and connections. I implied before that books that "tie up everything in a bow" lose their sense of wonder. Don't fall into that trap in real life. The world is open-ended. Who knows what exciting changes in science or history are about to be revealed. We need not live in a sterile plot where every loose end is tidily wrapped up by narrative convention. So go out and explore. There's always something to discover.

[1] Sim-miles... similes?

[2] The vast majority of theories that were once popular are now debunked. That's not to say they haven't grown successively more and more useful, nor that they have not been useful stepping stones to something greater. Much as I hope our current theories progress.

[3] This happens a lot. For a poem on this ad hoc tendency in historical analysis, check out Luther's post here. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lat7h/blog/posts/72.html

Twitchy

My roommate Wil introduced me to a new phenomena. On the surface, it seems to be a basic emulator of a classic game, Pokémon Red. But delve inside, and you find a story of civilizations of order and anarchy, betrayal, torture, and triumph. A hundred thousand souls fighting gladiatorial battle under the cruel gaze of the goddess called Chance.

Twitch.tv is a channel where, if you're tired of playing video games yourself, you can watch other people play video games in real time. They play and sometimes talk while they play, and you watch them play and sometimes write a comment in the side chat bar.

I know. I'd put it beneath "sorting uno cards by closest prime number" on my to-do list as well.

But somebody got innovative, and Python'd up our beloved Pokémon Red so that the chat window is routed directly to the game's controls. I type "left" in the chat window, Red takes a step to the left. Problem is, if any one of the several thousand people also watching this game type "right" he takes a step to the right.

So what was once the story of a spunky up-and-coming Pokemon master becomes the tale of a child possessed by a hundred thousand souls all desperately clawing for control over his mind and body. This is Twitch Plays Pokémon.

Sounds fun!

When I looked up this stat, TPP had:

120,000 Simultaneous participants.

19 million unique views.

Although the emulator mimics the game perfectly, the opensource control mechanics transform the game into something wildly different. There are only a few controls (D-Pad, A, B, Start, Select) but since there are thousands and thousands of people entering them simultaneously, our little protagonist Red looks like a seizure ward's annual disco ball and strobe light festival.  He goes up, down, start menu, tries to use an unusable item, tries to use an unusable item , tries to use an unusable item, goes left, goes down, goes right, ad infinitum.

Every command entered is streamed in a queue into the emulator. The number of commands and a 40 second delay before your typed command hits the screen makes trying to consciously control Red comparable to trying to type an article by throwing paper airplanes at a keyboard in  30 mile an hour winds.  But if you have enough paper airplanes… Indeed, perhaps the most common metaphor applied to Twitch Plays Pokémon is the infinite Shakespeare monkeys and their literary designs.

It's interesting to see the difficulty of various tasks be inverted. Finding the time to level up your Pokemon becomes irrelevant when there are thousands of people playing, literally 24/7. Conversely, incredibly trivial tasks became insanely difficult obstacles. With the chaos of inputs, just getting Red to go in the right direction was difficult. If the right direction includes more than one turn or a path along a ledge, insanely difficult becomes nigh-impossible. For example,  in front of one gym right above a ledge, TPP spent 24 consecutive hours trying to walk into a building.

They spent so much time accidentally jumping down ledges that they had just spent 6 hours climbing up, that some began to wonder if Red had found a new life purpose. As one fan wrote in a parody letter to Prof Oak:

“Dear Oak, Its been 3 days since i started this journey. And you know what? Screw becoming a pokemon master. I am going to be ledge jumping master. I been training 8 hour a day. send my love to mom. signed Red Ledge jumper.”

To counteract the randomness, the amassed thousands organized themselves. They made websites with strawpolls about major decisions, made a google-doc[1] to announce the current goal and record their stats, outlining plans for navigating the complex challenges of walking, fighting battles, and catching pokemon[2]. They even made their own subreddit.  The spontaneous order had a surprising effect on the game.

Not only did they make significant-- and frankly astounding-- progress, the quirks and oddities of the game took on a life of their own in the memes of the fan pages. Their starter, a charmeleon named "ABBBBBBK (" they affectionately nicknamed "Abby" while a rattata named "JLVWNNOOOO" was dubbed "Jay Leno".  The start menu opened and closed constantly, and one random item, the Helix Fossil, was checked so much that players decided Red must be consulting the Helix for guidance. Soon they were convinced that Red was on a quest to resurrect the fossilized god Helix, and to triumph over the evil dark Dome fossil.

But this being the internet, not everyone wanted Red to progress. On top of the randomness element, TPP had to fight against trolls who would willingly sabotage any current goal. So if Red had to walk along a long edge for 10 or 15 steps, all it took was for one troll to manage a "down" command, and a hundred thousand people would scream in agony as they watched Red jump a ledge and destroy hours of effort. To a troll, enraging an audience of thousands on a livestream game with a single button input is the scent of sweet lamb's blood on the morning breeze. Some people just want to watch the world burn.

But as bad as the trolls were, the pure randomness was worse. At the PC, the players accidentally released Abby, their starter pokemon, and Jay Leno, never to return (releasing your starter pokemon is something you should never EVER do). This past Sunday was named "Bloody Sunday" when they accidentally released 12 pokemon, several of them high-leveled.

At one point, they had reached a section of the game where they could not progress without precision movement, and the designer introduced a new mechanic "Democracy", where the responses would be summed up every 10 seconds or so, and the most popular would be followed. Many players rebelled at this mid-game change, interfering with the goal or typing "start9" which would open the start menu nine times in a row.

So the designer tweaked the game again, allowing players to type in the chat to vote for "anarchy" (the original setup) or "democracy". When there was a 75% majority of one, it switched the control method.

As time went on, the mythos and politics became more complicated, and the stakes higher. Anarchists fought to uphold the purity of their traditional gameplay, and reviled against the new democracy, calling it "Dome-ocracy" (i.e. pertaining to the evil Dome fossil). Democracists maintained that slow and steady was necessary for sections requiring delicate control. But it was so slow and a good deal more boring.

Factions divided by Anarchy/Democracy or different paths and game choices got pretty riled up at times. Epics of governments and rebellion, religion and destiny were enacted in the following of the Helix fossil. Here is one of my favorites: the story false prophet Eevee, as told by a player:

In order to progress we needed a Pokémon that can learn surf. We had 5 of our 6 Pokémon slots full, so if we bought, caught, or obtained a Pokémon, it would go into that sixth slot. Eevee if evolved into Vaporeon works. Or we could be given Lapras which works. Or they could catch a Pokémon which is super hard to coordinate with 70k users. If eevee evolved into a non surf learning pokemon, we'd have to go to the pokemon PC to get a surf pokemon out of storage. We picked Eevee, evolved it into the flareon, tried to go to the box, and released two of our pokemon, including a starter, and deposited the helix fossil, which is being revered as a sort of God. If we didn't go with Eevee, we may still have our two released pokemon and our God. Instead, the false prophet killed them.

Pasted from <http://cheezburger.com/196869>

Wow. Just wow.

Saturday morning, around 5am, after 16d 7h 45m 30s, the collective hive mind finally defeated the Final Four, and beat the game.

 [1] https://sites.google.com/site/twitchplayspokemonstatus/

[2]

https://sites.google.com/site/twitchplayspokemonstatus/older-information-pokemon-red

[3] Here are some other links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pok%C3%A9mon

http://mashable.com/2014/02/19/pokemon-stream-twitch/

Bush Thoughts

I am brimming with ideas. They come to me everywhere I look, everything I see. If I think about it enough, almost any subject will suggest an idea of some kind or another. My head is so bursting with them that I can't even get them all down on paper. They're always-present and ever-elusive. I scribble them in my bedside notebook before sleep claims me and they leak from my skull with the bleary morning light. The only sure way to catch them is to write them down. And if I don't anchor them down in time they evaporate into steam like dew beside a fire.

But the real problem is, even after nailing them down with a solid two-sentence anchor: what do I do with all these ideas?[1]

Because a new idea isn't developed. It isn't clear, nor it doesn't have the maturity of a well-rounded argument. Instead, it's vivid and bright and has a few principles of nature or science, famous faces and a couple of stirring one-liners. But that's it. Like a virus, an idea is powerful, but it won't go anywhere without a human host. Like an embryo, it has incredible potential, but will go nowhere if it's not properly incubated. Before it can be effective, it has to be refined, restructured to flow well, connected to other sciences and great thinkers, given analogies and anecdotes that will resonate with a wider human audience, and finally polished to a gleaming sheen that will glisten in others' minds long after you are gone.

But I don't have time for that.

So what do I do with all these ideas?

Hoard 'em, mostly. It is the sad truth. I would love to turn them all into glorious works and send them out into the world, but that takes time and thought and effort, and as previously stated, I have more ideas than I can develop. So they pile up. Only one in maybe fourteen or fifteen ever see more than a two-sentence paragraph. Sad in'nit?

Perhaps the real reason they pile up is that I don't often stick with one long enough to refine it. The minute I start to refine one idea, it sprouts three more and I just go around collecting more and more idea seeds without ever finishing planting any. This is a common problem seen in microcosm in my essays. I will have a "bush" of ideas. A huge, overgrown, monstrous bushy-bush of ideas that are all connected, but that don't flow in any central theme or purpose. It's just kinda growing everywhich way. I see this in my papers, and my blogposts[2]. Like this one. I was shooting for a three sentence intro, and then the pics and a sweet goodnight and off to bed. Yeah. Didn't happen.

How to fix my ineffectual, rambly bush?

I don't want to stop catching ideas. I just want to order and develop them more. So maybe I can...

1. Plan the trunk -  Figure out what I want to do from the outset. Set my argument-tree[3] growing right while still malleable, and have all the branches tying straight back to the central theme. Cohesive, constructive, purposeful and direct. Might have to throw away the first draft entirely, and start from scratch, but it's possible.
2. Prune the bush - In the words of the mortal Stephen King[4] "Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings." Cut out the fluff. Write to tell yourself the story/argument, edit and cut so it is only the story (or argument). More is not better. A knife point cuts better than a brick.

Yeah, I think that would help. We'll see if I can get a handle on my big-bushy multi-thematical rambles and instead churn out high powered punch-you-in-the-face essays made of nothing but thesis statement and muscle. Until then, enjoy the rambles! They're fun, and the ideas are all so great, how could you pick only one?[5]

[1] Maybe by now I should mention that not all ideas are good ideas? Some of them are just ok. Or bad. Sometimes it's hard to tell until you've worked with them a bit.

[2] Seriously, if you want to see what I mean, read some of my other posts. I would point you to the couch one, but I don't think that's fair. The point of that whole exercise was to write for 30 uninterrupted minutes without any plan or editing.

[3] My argument-tree-metaphor

[4] Never read his horror, but I really liked his book On Writing

[5] These pictures show just some of the list of possible topics for the blog. The "seeds" tab is now the running list of ideas and scraps of blog posts. I think I have five pages in it? We're not even getting into my other sections-- or the stuff in my paper notebooks that I carry around. Yikes. 

Pressuring and Persuasion

Part 2: Not pressuring and persuading

We all want things. In many cases, other people do not want the things we want. So we want them to want what we want.

You might have noticed that in my last entry, I posted an ellipsis.

While it may have seemed that I was simply slacking off, it really wasn't[1]. It actually was the first lesson in persuading people.

I am an enthusiastic person, and often over-eager when it comes to introducing friends to books, foods, philosophy and the like. However, I've learned that if I take a moment to pause, I can gauge my friends' interest in the conversation. Do they lean forward? Do they question and comment? Or do they move on to a different topic? That evaluation informs me of my audience's state, and allows the curious mind to anticipate rather than react, which is a key to learning well.

So last week was a chance for people to respond, to either inquire about my promised post or to breath a sigh of relief. And the verdict was: Sufficient Interest.

And so we continue with our question: how to persuade others. How do we get them to want what we want? Let's start with a more passive method in this post, and go proactive in the next.

Personal choice is powerful: Give them a chance to come to you.

This is counter-intuitive, but sometimes you can let them do the hardest part of persuading themselves. You can let them open up. When done correctly, this means merely pointing out an open door, another way of thinking or living, and letting their own curiosity bring them through[2]. Closed minds are impenetrable to any attack, and the fiercer the assault, the stronger the resistance. To open up a person to an idea, you might mention things that appeal to their curiosity, their desire for knowledge, novelty, fun, or any other motivator, and let it work[3]. Only they can open their minds. There's a reason Christ only explained his parables to those who came to him afterward asking about them. Invite all, carry on with the few who are willing.

Strange as it may seem, this oft-ignored tool, when it works, is incredibly effective.

The reason it is oft-ignored is because it's inconvenient. It's not fast, it's not sure, and it's not under your control.  Which is another phrase for "excruciatingly frustrating".  I've found it most useful in the very short term and the very long term.  Short term because I can round up the initially interested without putting people on the defensive or scaring anyone off. Long term because it takes very little effort to quietly leave a door open, and you never know when some curious soul will step through. The real challenge is to set up everything just right, like a well-set fire pit, so when you see the slightest spark of interest, you have a place to catch and fuel it into a full-fledged bonfire. Despite its inconvenience, this can be a very powerful method of persuasion.

How powerful?

Hard to gauge objectively, but when I reflect, most of my real passions and hobbies are things that I came upon myself, or at most, was introduced to. Rarely have things which were explicitly foisted on me set down deep roots.

Remember, Your job is not to make them do X. It's to make them want to do X.

Cats are fickle creatures, but Curious

A useful analogy might be cats. Storm through your house yelling for your cat, the feline will dash into its nearest bolt-bole.  It doesn't matter if you're waving a steak or a new toy, that cat is gone. If however, you call its name once, lay out the toy in an open place where it is sure to walk by, sooner or later your curious cat will saunter up in it's own good time and begin to investigate on its own[4]. 

So maybe you should back off. Give them some time to investigate in their own.

But if they don't, Part 3 is coming up!

[1] The first time I missed, at least. The second was totally me being behind on writing.

[2] With you as a helpful tour guide, of course.

[4] Think Tom Sawyer and the fence-style.

[4]And if it doesn't, there's literally nothing you can do. I mean, it's a cat. There are alternative methods for humans, but cats... man.

[5] I found today's post quite a bit vaguer and fluffier than I'd like. But not so much that I'd go a week without posting something. 

Pressuring

We all want things. In many cases, other people do not want the things we want. So we want them to want what we want.

We've all put down a book or walked out of a movie so life-changing that you can't even see straight. Your first impulse, after the initial rush has died down, is to seize the first person you see and shout "You have to see this! You'll love it! It will change your life and you'll never be sad again."

Despite your evangelical zeal, they don't seem to take your endorsement very seriously (maybe it had something to do with your glazed eyes and dribble of drool). Instead of running to the nearest bookstore and buying this book (as they should) they promise to get to it next week. Three weeks later, you've left fridge reminders, passive-aggressively asked them about it multiple times, and finally physically handed them a copy with your physical hands. But they still haven't read it. Why, they even seem to be (gasp!) avoiding it!

You've casually recommended them books before and they liked them. What the heck is their problem now?!

Why do enthusiastic endorsements backfire?

Let's empathize

See through their eyes.

It might be helpful to think of an instance when someone tried to convert you to one of their preferences and failed. What did they do wrong? For instance when your mother mentions "that nice girl down the street", and shoots a significant glance your way. Or when an old mentor figure hands you a sacred dog-eared tome along with the solemn sanction to read and ingest its wholesomeness, as they and their father before them has done.

These are people we care about. People whose opinion we respect, who have our best interests at heart.

Why exactly then are we so uneasy to take their advice?

Ok, we've spent some time on the other side of the table. Let's switch back to your perspective. Why didn't your friend take your recommendation?

It's a matter of taste

Specifically, mine vs. yours.

Believe it or not, but people have different preferences, and what is to one man the very essence of hilarity is to another just a British kid biting his bro's finger. And often that's ok. We like that, know that and respect that. But if you've gone batcrazy about this book, your friend might have decided to skirt around the edges of the issue rather than face the full fury of your evangelicalized fervor. "I haven't had time to read it" is easier to say than "I don't think I'll like it, and given your level of fanaticism, I never intend to risk our friendship on finding out."

And so, depending on the situation, a fanatic endorsement can be less effective than a casual one[1]. The more you hype something the higher the stakes. And from your friend's perspective*. If I tell you I hate it, I make you sad. If I tell you I like it (or tolerate it), you try to make me vice-president of the fan club. It's a lose-lose situation, and the risk of losing friendship is higher than any potential gain of maybe reading a good book.

You might as well be playing high-stakes poker with friends. It doesn't matter whether I lose the money or win the money and lose the friends, I'm losing either way. The only winning move is not to play[2].

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

Being coerced lowers our intrinsic motivation

If you know me, you've probably heard me talk about intrinsic motivation. Some things (like reading, eating, calling friends) you do because you find them inherently rewarding, you are intrinsically motivated. Other things (going to work, driving the speed limit, showering[3]) you do because there are external factors, or extrinsic motivations (money, social pressure) which push you to do them.

Studies have shown that if you pay somebody to do something, they don't like to do it as much. This is true even if you're paying kids to play videogames. Yes, you heard me right. Pay kids to play videogames, and they won't like playing videogames as much. They'll probably do it more, but like it a little less. When you have to do something to get paid, your ulterior motives take the edge off the enjoyment.[4]

In one study, they rewarded school kids for eating certain veggie or fruit portions during lunch. And surprise! The kids ate more of their specified rewarded-food.

BUT!

They liked that food less. And they still liked it less 7 months later. So you can pay your picky kid to eat beans, but he'll stop when the cash runs out, and he'll likely dislike beans for the rest of a long time.

This means that not only can pressuring/extorting someone to Do Thing can backfire, even simply paying them to Do Thing can backfire. It might work in the short-term, but you lose in the long-term.

I can't go into it attribution theory as much as I'd like, but let's leave it at this: The more pressure you're under, the more you'll think "I did it to get so-and-so off my back" and the less you'll think " I did it for its own sake".

People like to have control over their own lives

And don't appreciate you taking it from them

Whaaaaatt?? I know right? Whooda thunk?

When you give advice, that's fine. When you invite, that's also cool. But when you take a piece of cake and jam it down my throat with a toilet plunger, don't be hurt when I can't compliment the flavor. I probably  can't even taste it because I'm picking chunks of it out of my lungs.

I've fallen into this trap myself before. I think a few of my friends still have minor panic attacks when they hear the title of my favorite book, for fear I'll jump out from behind a corner and throw it at their head. This is a valuable lesson. Try to force a person to like it, and they'll hate it. Sad as it is, my pressuring and cajoling has permanently filed "Joseph's favorite book" under "Items that Provoke Intense Fear" in their brains. It's hard to enjoy something after that.

And as we learned from Intrinsic Motivation, even when terror is not an issue, influencing other people's attitudes is complicated, man.

So how do you convince them? Unlike many other kinds of human interaction, this is not coercion, this is not strong-arming.  I can force you to eat pickled beats, but you'll still hate pickled beats and you'll hate me even more. Forcing a person to do something is easy; you want them to like it. How do you do that?

I'll… uh-- I'll tell you next week. I'm sorry. Really sorry. Frankly, I'm surprised you've kept reading this monstrosity of rambleness this long[5]. The only explanation I can think of is that you await with a burning hunger for the secret to manipulating your friends like clay, or sock puppets.

Well, tune in next week folks!

[1]Under some circumstances. As always there are exceptions and I overly caveat all things I say.

[2]As Joshua would certainly tell you.

[3]Just for you, Ruth.

[4] Anecdotally, I've heard basketball players say the game becomes less fun once it's no longer a game.

[5] I should have cut that chunk about intrinsic/extrinsic, shouldn't've I? Or at least axed the redundancy of the forced vegetable consumption scenarios.

An Exhaustive Room Description

Hello!

I wrote 78% of my Thursday-due blogpost, but I like it enough to keep working on it, so I'm not giving it to you yet. I'll polish it up and post it another day. I'm sorry that I occasionally give you stuff that I don't mind vomiting out half-finished, because:

 A) I'm vomiting it out half-finished,

and 

B) You therefore know I don't think it's worth the effort to polish. 

Heh, ok, so sometimes I'm just a slow writer. Whatever. Anyway!

Here's a writing exercise I did in my living room, about my living room. The prompt (given in bold) was supplied by Mary Robinette Kowal. You can find it yourself at http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/exercising-your-story-telling-techniques. True to the prompt, it's long, repetitive, rambly and unedited. Very long. And boring. Since it's only about my living room, I pretty much wrote about couches for a straight 30 minutes. If you really want to keep reading, consider yourself warned.

Exercise 1 

Sit in a location and describe it using third person. You are the point of view character, but instead of writing in first person, write in third. You must keep writing constantly for thirty minutes. Try to use all five senses, which include what is heard, smelt, felt, seen, and tasted. Do not describe people in the location, except where they cause the room to react. For instance, someone shifting in their chair would cause a squeak in the room.

The room had three sofas, each a different color and material. The oldest, and by far the most expensive, was a red leather affair, wide and possessed of a haughty elegance. The second sofa was brown plush, fluffy and deep. You could tell by the number of wrinkles crisscrossing the cushions that it was the softest of the three. People who sat it in would often startle as they sank far deeper into the sofa than expected, only to be lulled by the gentle support and smooth caress of the cushions. The third couch was obviously the most junior. It had a corduroy green cover that was a little too large, and bagged and sagged in odd places, making the smaller couch look like it had stolen the skin off a green elephant. Since the other two sofas were bare, the cover gave the third a distinctly sheepish look, as if it was trying to dress up to impress the others. Even worse, it wasn't really a full sofa. More of a loveseat, it was. Only the desiccated pull-out bed made it paradoxically heavier than either of the two full-fledged couches.

 The low hardwood table was stained a lovely walnut color that matched the first couch. It gave the living room a completed feel, almost  as if it were a real parlor or living room rather than the frugal entryway to a college bachelors apartment. Even the chips and scratches along its carved legs could not detract from its solidity.

The room overall had the feel of a room that had put together in a mixture of careful eclecticism and slapdash opportunism. Which, in fact, it was. The rich plush of the leather couch stood at odds with the cheap green-covered loveseat across from it, but somehow they both seem to belong to the room, if not to each other. The TV was huge, but not ostentatious, since it was an old square box that was as thick as it was wide. It should have dominated the room, but it didn't, probably because it knew it was only the second-hand gift of convenience given by the former occupants to the current ones. It had been a gift of convenience for the giver, not the receiver, as had most of the furniture in the room. The bookshelf (a light-colored Ikea piece) didn't even have a back, but was simply pressed against a wall and laden with so many books that one would be hard-pressed to notice that it didn't even have a back. The bookshelf had been literally pulled from the trash on a dumpster-diving expedition, rescued, washed, and put to good use.

The entertainment center beneath the TV held a bundle of connector cables for hooking up laptops, a few DVDs that ranged from Michael Bay to Miyazaki, and a set of family board games without even the light layer of dust that the DVD player held.

The room denoted an unusual amount of culture and taste for a college bachelor's pad. There was a full piano in one corner, a guitar in another, and piles of literary classics interspersed with Calvin and Hobbes collections on every surface that could carry reading material.

The floor was hardwood, a little dusty from frequent use but otherwise clean and well-kept. The hum of the AC was interspersed with the thumps of slamming car doors in the parking lot outside as neighbors left for work.

A pile of rolled and folded blankets were tucked in a basket in front of the guitar. The room was completely still, save for the green row of lights in the modem, which flickered at a frantic pace.  All the rest of the room was immobile.

Two paintings stood above the two full couches, each unconsciously matching the tone of the couch with their frame.

The only poster in the room was a plastic-paned one of Michael Scott, hanging above the piano. In the evenings, the soft yellow lamp on the piano would turn on, and the manager of Dunder-Mifflin would appraise the room with a cool eye and crossed arms, a glowing benevolence as comically out-of-place as he had ever been in The Office.

Exercise 2

In puppetry we say that “focus indicates thought.” What your character is looking at is what they are thinking about.  As a writer, you can only show the audience one thing at a time, so the order in which you show them and, more importantly, what you choose to show them becomes a door into your character’s thoughts.

Look at the room again.  What’s the first thing a ballet dancer would notice about it? A lumberjack? A teacher? A cook? A child?

Exercise:  Write a short description of the same room from the point of view of a character. Pick a role for your character which is easily defined, such a dancer, janitor, or child.

The emphasis here is in choosing which items the character would notice first and the order in which they would notice them. Your reader should be able to identify the character’s role without ever needing to name it. 

The first good sign upon entering the room was the smell. It was the smell of regular cleaning and warm, constant use.  As if someone was baking fresh bread in a laundromat.  No matter how much you tried, no amount of frantic last-minute cleaning would make an apartment smell like this. That was enough to forgive the piles of mail addressed to graduates that had moved away semesters ago, collected on two coffee tables and the top of one bookshelf. A quick scan was enough to confirm initial impressions. No food stains, no hidden piles of dirty laundry or trash. No badly-disguised pile of dishes with a blanket over them. All more or less in order.

The more permanent aspects of the room were not in as good a state. Though the furniture was nice and artwork tasteful yet unassuming, the walls behind them had the tell-tale scratches of eight or twelve moves since they were last repainted. The hardwood floor was even worse. It had been mopped not too long ago, and swept within a week, but there was no covering up the scuffs and scratches of sliding sofa legs and the deep grooves cut piano wheels, leading to the corner where the culprit instrument meekly stood. 

Ok! So that was it. If you read all that, feel free to make any comments on the exercises, results etc., and to guess the occupation of my Point of View Character in Exercise 2. First correct answer in the comments wins! 

P.S 

Also I just realized that since I've spent the last week with family I should have talked about how cool we all are and what great times we've had this Christmas. So... sorry, I didn't. I do that to you all in person. Love you!

Problems that can be Solved by Punching Things

I was sitting at the front desk in the library, typing away to the background lull of studying students. The hundreds of mouths muttering over their books like a medieval choir of monks chanting chemistry formulas. But that night, the medieval chorus had a drummer. A small irregular beat, dull and heavy. The drumming increased in intensity till I recognized the sound for what it was- the desperate pounding of a sleep-deprived student.  A bleary-eyed student who had been ridiculed and mocked by four consecutive chapters of review questions, who had read and reread the textbook until her fingers were stained an off-yellow color by the highlighter, a student who had turned to the last refuge of the all-nighter-- caffeine-- only to have her quarters stolen by a surly vending machine which dangled the beverage just out of reach. 

When I walked over to the machine, she was kneeling, trying in vain to reach an arm up through the dispenser slot. She had already tried rocking the machine[1] and stabbing the buttons without success. I explained I had some experience with this particular recalcitrant vendor, and stepped forward to assess the situation. The drink had been trapped diagonally between its shelf and the transparent plastic cover. With one succinct punch to the plastic pane, the drink rebounded and fell down with a plunk.

She thanked me, I smiled, and we went back to our tasks.

There is something deeply satisfying in a task that can be solved simply by punching something[2]. Much of the "work" I've done in my life has been in pursuit of an academic education, and therefore, mental, abstract, and immaterial. While that also means the things I work on are new and interesting, occasionally the lack of substance of it all can be extremely frustrating.

Which is why it is nice to fix things by punching them. Problems that don't need calculation and planning, don't need creativity or a new angle, they just need brute effort. There's a job. You pay the price in pain and sheer exertion. Job is finished.

Splitting wood is my favorite chore for this exact reason.  Yeah, sure, you can refine your swing, sharpen your axe (or maul, in my case), but when it comes down to it, there's nothing to do but hit the wood really hard with a really heavy piece of metal. Your progress is extremely evident. You see how much wood you have to split, and you see how much you have split. You know everything, and the only variables you need to monitor are how fast you're going and how hard you're hitting. Simple. Satisfying.

In my mind, that's as close to the Platonic ideal of work as it gets.

Now don't get me wrong-- I love mental work too.  I will fiddle with tricky riddles or math problems long after I should have looked up the answer. A lively debate or intricate paper can be fascinating and fun. But sometimes the world is just a little too complicated, and I don't even know how to get a firm grip on understanding the situation, much less on how to solve it.

Sometimes, you just want to have a problem you can punch until it's solved[3]. 

[1] Don't do this. Vending machines kill more people than sharks. 
[2] This does not apply to people.
[3] Seriously, people are not one of the problems you can solve by punching. It just makes things worse.

Lottery of Popularity

AKA How much objectively "Better" is it really?

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. - Ecclesiastes 9:11

Time and chance happens to us all

Here's a question for you. How much of an idea's success depends on how good of an idea it is, and how much depends on time and chance?

Many things that have great success are good, but do they succeed simply because they're good? Or because they are good and in the right place at the right time? Is goodness necessary but not sufficient?

I think we can all agree that the answer to that is "yes". An idea can be good, but things can interfere. A fly may be born with an super-mutation that makes it immune to aging, but if it gets swatted before it can pass it on, that beneficial mutation is gone, while the thousands of fly male pattern baldness genes  or stubby proboscis genes continue to muck up the pool. An business venture might be wonderfully innovative, but if your start-up gets hit halfway through by a recession, too bad. Luck matters. There's no magical scale that weighs the intrinsic value of an idea and sends the golden ones off to fame and the bad ones down the chute. 

But have you ever wondered how much it matters? How much bad luck could a specific good idea suffer and still come out on top? How much good luck would you need for a really bad idea to take off? (Stephanie Meyers, I'm looking at you) [1]

Let's get concrete

When we think of "classic" we tend to imagine something that can reach across barriers of language and culture to pluck at the heartstrings, regardless of one's upbringing. We like to hope that there's some intrinsic humanity to those works that give them a value in their own right.

But what if we took word-for-word reproductions of great works of literature and reinserted them back in time under other authors names? Or in other time periods? Would they still rise to the top? Would critics gasp in awe regardless, and hold these jewels of human nature up to the world? Or would many of our greatest works be considered trivial, perhaps moderately passable reading, and then brushed aside. [2]

Would Hamlet be as adored as it is if it wasn't written by Shakespeare?

What if it had been authored by a woman?

Would Bill Gates be a billionaire if his dad hadn't been a lawyer?

Would [random play] be well-loved if it had been written by Shakespeare?

Would the Coca Cola formula be just as popular if it had started in India?

We already know you can present an idea as good as "wash hands after corpse-handling and before childbirth" to the medical community and still have it be a complete failure, if you go about it right. Just ask Ignaz Semmelweis. What did spreading the joys of hand-washing get him? A one-way ticket to a mental asylum so good he lasted two full weeks there before dying at age 47.

Your Life

You might feel discouraged at the thought of all the little random factors that steal the race from the swift and the bread from the wise.[3] My advice? In your own life, it probably won't have that much of an effect in the end.

The bell curve and standard deviation was to me an epiphanic model.[4] When studying it, I realized that while I couldn't predict an individual iteration of a behavior in my life , I could predict the mean perfectly. And every little inch of behavior I could muster to shift that mean would increase my chances of the rare spectacular success, and decrease my chances of the rare catastrophic failure. I may have no control whether tomorrow's random variables are one standard deviation above the mean or one below, but I can sure as heck control the nonrandom variables' mean.[5]

Too often, we think that one little bit of luck can make or break us. If we'd just bet on that horse or this stock, or just gotten on the other train rather than that one, life would be made and all would be dandy. Let me tell you something.

Life doesn't work like that.

Bill Gates didn't become a billionaire just cause his father was a lawyer, and Semmelweis didn't fail to spread antiseptic theory just because he was born in 1818. Those each played their part, but life has a lot more going on in it. There are principles and patterns and knowledge which can lever history with far more force than any random duke getting shot ever could.

Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."[6] Work steadily, and learn a lot. Focus on what's under you control rather than the success or failure of the dice, and you'll have all the luck you need.

Remember, our lives are taken as X approaches infinity. When you look at eternity, all the little bumps and little troughs get smoothed out, and there's nothing left but you and your trajectory. So make it a good one.

[1]If I had a time machine, one of the many things which I would be to conduct empirical studies on the social sciences. Mostly performed on the future, so as to give me a stable reference point. (Thanks T-Rex)

[2]Side note: Some "classics" are so merely because they were the first in a genre or movement, not because they were the peak. The first guy to independently invent something is a genius. The second guy to invent independently is lame.

[3] Or encouraged, if you're worried about not fitting in the "wise and swift club".  Why not be optimistic if you have the chance?

[4] Differential and integral calculus also had life-altering impact on the way I view the world.

[5] If I had a particular video game score with a normal distribution, a mean of 50, and SD of 25, I could try a hundred times and have a good chance at a coveted 95 score. For better chances I could also increase my number of trials or increase my mean, or both.

[6] A saying which, though said to have been said by him, was apparently never actually said by him. "Is quoted as saying" is yet another one of those handy phrases which makes anything that follows it necessarily true.