7 Hard Problems, Tradecraft

Why Both Science and Philosophy Are Important

Warning: This post is a little arcane.  tl;dr

Most of us understand why science is important, even if we don’t explicitly study it ourselves.

First of all, there’s the unbelievable track record of scientific research paying off.  Health.  Productivity of industry and agriculture.  Longevity.  Well-being.

Well, that’s an argument for somebody studying science, but maybe not us ourselves.

Then there’s the scientific method itself.  The basic idea:

  1. Theorize something true: e.g., “what if vaccines caused autism”
  2. Devise an experiment that will show if the theory is false: “see whether significantly more vaccinated children are on the autism spectrum”
  3. Perform the experiment: No Significant Difference
  4. Adjust the theory based on the result: “Vaccines probably don’t cause autism”

Note the “probably” in #4 and the “false” in #2.  You need multiple independent reps of the experiment in order to be pretty damn sure about it.  And you can never prove a theory right; you can only prove a theory wrong.

The scientific method is worth implementing in your everyday life.  You have a hunch why your toilet doesn’t run?  Do the experiment, observe the result, rinse and repeat.

You have a hard time finding stable relationships?  Why might that be so?  Try an experiment to see.  Rinse and repeat.

So science has some legs, both for all of us and for each of us.

What about philosophy?  Isn’t that just a bunch of people asking, “how do I know if reality is real”?

Well, yes and no.

Philosophy is a bunch of people sitting around asking dumb, obvious-sounding questions.  But it isn’t just a bunch of people asking dumb questions.

It’s cleaning the mind for better scientific theories.

Mark Twain said a ways back:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so

That’s what philosophy is for, cleaning out your mind so that you don’t think you know something for sure when you should have a bit of doubt (ok, a lot of doubt).

It’s what we call a “reality check” when we do it with our feelings.  But with philosophy we’re doing it with our thoughts.

Maybe another analogy is strength training for the mind.

How can you start a practice of thinking philosophically?

One easy thing to do is to ask yourself “why” 5 times about your answer to any big question.

“I have trouble with relationships because I care too much.”

“Why?”

“Because I think that love is all about both people caring more for one another than they do for themselves.”

“Why?”

“I need someone else’s validation to approve of myself.”

“Why?”

OMG.  Great question.

That was only three “why’s” and it led to a true Moment of Zen.

Try it.

7 Hard Problems

In the Week’s Work So Far

The “master anecdote” for this week’s chapter — “Cooperation vs. Competition” — is a sketch of a family that’s run completely on a competitive basis: the kids have to earn the right to a ride to school, etc.

The point was to establish that some institutions in society — family is the prime example — are overwhelmingly cooperative.  And even institutions that are more competitive — school, work — could use a balance between cooperation and competition in order to run better.

(School is famous, for example, for not training workers very well for the world of work.  There are multiple reasons why this is so, but balance of cooperation and competition is among them.)

The work is going pretty well, although I was no more prepared for this chapter than for 1 or 2.

7 Hard Problems, Cabinet of Curiosities, Workhacking

Cabinet of Curiosities: David Graeber, Trans-national Treasure?

David Graeber is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I’m reading with great interest.  But he is a man of many parts.

In the first place, he is described as an “anarchist activist”.  He was involved with Occupy Wall Street and is a card-carrying member (if they carry cards) of the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World (their slogan is terrific: “An Injury to One is an Injury to All”).

And these interests have prompted two recent books, which I discovered the other day and now have on order:

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy is a great title.  I’m looking forward to reading it.

And Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is an even more terrific title.

I’m guessing that the two books are following a new thread for Graeber: the meaninglessness and folly of work in the “advanced” countries.

His thesis, or one of them, seems to be that instead of shortening the work week as work becomes less necessary, our captains of industry are draining the meaning out of jobs but insisting that people show up in costume regardless.

I’ve been interested in two memes about the world of work, in the past as a VC but now as an author: 1) the “Mechanical Turk-ization” of work (Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s work-by-the-drink project for turning people into computer-like clones) and 2) the Millenial-driven quest for meaning in work, which is a reaction and a hopeful sign.

I’ll be interested to see what Graeber has to say about these.

(I’m calling him a trans-national treasure because he is currently evidently in London teaching at the LSE.)

7 Hard Problems, Deep Work

Themes for Work and Learning, week of November 11, 2018

So, I didn’t finish the vomitout for Chapter 2 last week either.  There seems to be a pattern.

I’m going to persist with my scheme, though, and continue vomiting out with Chapter 3, “Cooperation vs. Competition.”

In terms of reading, I was idiotically ambitious about my reading last week.  I did a tad of reading in Black Reconstruction, not a word of reading in Capital in the 21st Century, and a solid amount of reading only in Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

“Solid”, but not definitive.  I still haven’t finished Debt.  Sadder but wiser, I’m just going to aim to finish Debt, this week and let the chips fall where they may.

So, finish Debt and personfully try to vomitout Chapter 3.

Honestly?  Sounds like a recipe for fudging whether or not I got to the finish line.  But so be it.

Another issue coming up.  I’m starting up teaching a course, my Winter 2019 MOOC at University of Maryland on “Validating a Business Model”.  I’ve had the luxury the last couple of months of no teaching responsibilities and was able to do Deep Work four days a week (and many of those days got up to a decent # of Pomodoros of Deep Work, so all to the good!).

That’s going to change now.  I have to think how to schedule my Deep Work in the week (which may affect my blogging schedule).  The course starts up Monday the 26th so I’ll have some new conclusions by then.

Lifehacking, Workhacking

Hack of the Week: Evernote to Scrivener

I’ve seen all kinds of allusions to hacks that allow integration between Evernote and Scrivener.

Kind of a specialized hack in some sense, but enough people seem to want the capability that it’s worth reporting a success.

Here’s what I got from a Denise Olson post on Moultrie Creek Gazette about how to send an individual Evernote note to Scrivener.  I’ve gotten it to work on my Mac Scrivener (3.x).

  1. Save the whatever-it-is to Evernote
  2. Make sure your Scrivener is open to a project where you want the note to go
  3. Tell Evernote to Print the note, and then pick the PDF option
  4. You will see an option to “Send PDF to Scrivener”
  5. The note will appear in pdf form in your Scrivener Research section.

OMG

7 Hard Problems

Summing up the Week’s Work

Once again, the vomitout proved more difficult than I thought.  As I said on Tuesday, some of that came from new sources creeping into the work.  That’s not at all a bad thing, but one of the massive challenges of this project is reining in the scope.  Each of the 7 Problems could be a book in itself (or more! cf. Marx or Freud or Kant) so the challenge is to 1) say something interesting about each one and 2) not get bogged down.  It’s easy in these vomitouts to kind of skate over the material at what we might call the “Wikipedia” level of detail.  Nothing wrong with that except that people can just go look at Wikipedia.

Also, once again, the material was completely relevant to current events.  The talk about muckers this week jibed 100% with new (and newly senseless) mass attacks.  The talk about debt and debt forgiveness jibed 80% with our environment of trade wars and “nationalism”.

So that’s heartening in the sense that the project continues to seem very relevant.  If individuals applying a “self-improvement” narrative to themselves can improve our overall human performance on these seven hard problems, my work will have all been worthwhile.

A couple of comments and “likes” this week, as well, which is very heartening to me.  Please keep commenting!  I’m basically doing all this blogging in order to hear from you.

Tradecraft, Workhacking

Three Things I’ve Learned About Writing

I’ve learned three basic things about writing over the last forty-five years that are worth passing on.

  1. Real Writers Write, Would-Be Writers Moan About Not Being Able to Write

I learned this lesson from Judith Viorst, when I was just turning thirty.  I saw her at a party in TriBeCa and we walked about my writerly ambitions.  I don’t remember exactly what she said but this phrase is what I took away.

(Judith Viorst has written numerous terrific books in a welter of genres.  I’ve always particularly loved Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Bad Day and Necessary Losses, an irritating discouraging but ultimately hopeful book about why losing everything is good for you.

At first I was furious with her for saying this, but as I thought about it over months, I realized that, first of all, it was good advice: writing (as opposed to moaning about not being able to write) was within my power, and relatively easy to do (more on this later).  I also realized that it was literally true: if all you did was moan about not being able to write, you would never be a writer.  You would only be a wannabe.

So I started writing essentially every day, a practice I’ve kept up until now.

2) Writing Is Different From Rewriting

When you are doing the first draft of something, you are working against an internal critic I called — in my thirties and forties — The Censor.  The Censor wants to edit everything you write, I observed, and can paralyze you when you’re trying to get a first draft down on paper.

Once you have something written, The Censor becomes your friend.  And the work changes from getting something, anything, down on paper to getting it right, getting the right thing down on paper, getting the right effect.

These are two different jobs and they require two different philosophies, two different practices, and two different sets of techniques.

Writing — the first draft — requires a philosophy of toleration.  You have to subvert The Censor by pretending that everything you are putting on paper is peerless.

The practice appropriate to getting words on paper is write <X> pages of text a day without regard to its quality.  Quantity matters; quality does not.

A technique that corresponds to this is what Peter Elbow called “freewriting” in his terrific (and still relevant) classics Writing Without Teachers and Writing With Power.   When you freewrite, you just keep writing, even if (as sometimes happens) you write the same phrase over and over again like Stephen King’s character in The Shining.  To be fair, it doesn’t usually happen that you repeat page after page; you usually start gushing again after a few lines, not unlike restarting a jammed pen.

A variant of this is Calvin Trillin‘s vomitout strategy which is such a good name I’ve taken it over as the generic name for my first-draft efforts.

Rewriting requires putting The Censor back in charge.

(BTW, rewriting is not the same thing as “checking punctuation, spelling, and grammar”.  That’s great stuff, but that’s after rewriting.  Rewriting is whipping the first draft into shape, getting it to achieve exactly the effects you want it to achieve.)

The practice appropriate to rewriting is write for <X> hours a day without regard to the quantity of rewriting you finish.  If you spend 4 hours dithering over a comma, so be it.  If, on the other hand, you read over 10 pages without making any changes, you are probably not rewriting hard enough.

Writing can be done in a notebook or on a computer.  Rewriting usually requires space.  You have to spread out the whole work, look at the whole thing, put the whole thing up on the wall or out on a table.  It also requires what Cal Newport would call “deep work”: big blocks of uninterrupted time spent worrying the material.

3) Everyone has The Censor, and His Aim is to Keep You From Doing Your Work

Have you read The War of Art yet?  No?  Buy it.  Read it.

7 Hard Problems

What I’m Seeing In the Week’s Work So Far

This week I trusted my “vomitout muscles” a bit more than the previous week.

I was helped by the fact that I had even less of an outline to work with this week.  I kind of had my case study in place — in this chapter it was going to be Gun Violence, a textbook standoff between liberty (right to bear arms) and justice (right to life, so to speak).  But I didn’t have much beyond that incident.

So I kind of sat back and let what came to mind come to mind.

When I was thinking about gun violence, I recalled Stand on Zanzibar, an SF novel I had adored in the late 60’s, and when I dug into it I found a bunch of stuff about overpopulation, where “muckers” (slang in the novel for “those who run amok”) come from, how humanity might bridge the gap between liberty and justice.  Great grist for the mill.

Similarly, thinking about violence led me to the discussion in Debt: The First 5,000 Years about honor and saving face and why it’s important to understanding debt and solvency.  I think the several of the discussions in Debt are going to be indispensable for Ch. 2.

So I let my mind kind of wander a bit, or free-associate perhaps, and great stuff comes up that turns out to be incredibly useful.

Stay tuned, please.

7 Hard Problems, Cabinet of Curiosities

Cabinet of Curiosities: John Brunner and “Stand on Zanzibar”

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I loved John Brunner in the 60’s and 70’s.  His Shockwave Rider essentially introduced me to the Internet, and in an utterly relevant way: the Internet was a tool for nerds to have some power for a change!

I thought of Stand on Zanzibar this morning while I was working on my “Liberty vs. Justice” chapter for 7Hard.  The book takes a look at a complex world in 2010 (it was written in 1968) where people are clawing over one another for food, meaning, and happiness.  A world not that different from ours.

I haven’t dug into the book much — I found some references for my purposes this morning — but wanted to recommend it to this group for the way it made me feel then, and the way it makes me feel now: that our world is incoherent and horrible but also beautiful and full of wonder.  Good stuff.

7 Hard Problems

Themes for Work and Learning, week of November 4, 2018

Last week I didn’t 100% complete the vomitout of Chapter 1 (“Individual Wealth vs. Commonwealth”, aka WEALTH).

But vomitouts are peculiar.  Or maybe my vomitouts are peculiar.  I suffer from terminal terseness.  I’ll go to vomitout the big love scene in the novel and I write down “They were happy together for at least a while.”  And that satisfies my writing unconscious.  “He did it!  He finished the big love scene!”

It’s only when I come back to the scene later — as I did this last week in my first encounters with the adequacy of my outline — that I find out I really didn’t even begin to capture the scene.

So the vomitout for WEALTH is still incomplete.  What to do?

I’m going to go on with Chapter 2, “Liberty vs. Justice”.  (I’m not sure I have a one-word rubric for this one).  My reasoning?  I’ve got a head of steam for vomiting out, and what’s holding back the remainder of WEALTH actually depends on doing more background reading.  So I’m going to try to multi-task this week, and do both “Liberty/Justice” vomitout (4 pomos a day) and reading for WEALTH (4 pomos a day).  If I can do that, I can probably make some progress and get my other stuff done as well.

So what’s the reading for WEALTH?  I’m going to try to do two books this week (in addition to Black Reconstruction, of course, on which the clock is still ticking).

Book #1 is Thomas Piketty‘s warhorse, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  The title is an obvious nod to Marx’s Capital but the books couldn’t be more different.  Marx is deeply theoretical; he is intent to teach you a new way of thinking about history.  Piketty is deeply empirical: he is intent on proving, even to the satisfaction of a conservative economist, that the balance of power in the 21st century is shifting over to capital (mainly from labor).

In part you have to chalk up his empiricism and bending-over-backwards to the shame which all leftish thinkers feel over the failure of socialism/communism in the 20th Century.  The transformation of Communism-as-liberation to Communism-as-despotism undid leftish thinkers, and rightfully so.  It makes you think.

Book #2 is David Graeber‘s Debt: The First 5000 Years.

Graeber is also leftish, but he is after something bigger than Piketty: he wants to reimagine economic history as a cycle deeply formed by attitudes toward debt.  I am not at all doing justice to the book with a blurb like that, since Graeber, who is by training an anthropologist, delves into a welter of topics which are fascinating, brilliant, and annoying all at the same time.  I read the book once a couple of years ago and am now returning to read it more carefully for 7Hard.

Benefit from my 35 years of tech industry experience