Adulting or As You Were

11/6/2024

 

 Last night things went much worse than I expected.

Many of the people I know are worried, afraid for the state of the world, fearful for their rights or the rights of others. They expect war, collapse, tyranny, ruin. I worry about these things too.

And they are afraid – as am I – because the victory seemed so total. Coverage of the election served as a reminder that half, maybe even most of the country has values that seem the opposite of what we’ve been raised to believe we should laud.

Of the things to come, of the fears, and of how we can work with and smile at our fellow Americans in the coming months and years much will be written.

But what can you do, what can I to today? Tomorrow?

You can keep doing exactly what you already were, and what you would have if the outcome had been different:

You can pour up a cup of coffee and focus on your work. Create things of value, or at least strive to earn a lot of money. Control your expenses as best you can while not turning away from the marrow of good things that make life enjoyable. Invest as much and as wisely as you can. Through earning, regulated thrift, saving, and holding on to wealth you can provide for the people you love.

You can be kind, supportive, protective of those who need kindness, support, or a shield. Offer quiet assistance when asked, offer humble protection when it is needed. Continue to believe in the rights of the individual against bullies and strive to shield the innocent from the brutal machines of the state.

Try to model the behaviors and values you want to be more common in the world. Approach others with curiosity, acceptance of difference, and the kindness you would hope they would in turn direct towards any living being they encountered. Teach the children in your lives to be honest, fair, just, merciful and to never punch down. Live your life the best way you can, and hope your example inspires more good behavior in the world.

Protect the Earth, nature, and our complex fragile ecosystem. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Remember that your dollars are votes, and that small actions taken by billions of people regularly can help our planet sustain more and more pleasant life for far longer than if we simply give in to the rapacious fires of industry. You cannot save them all, but you can save this one.

And all this talk might seem a thin blanket of words against a future that can be frightening and unknown, in which dark forces seem to have gained the upper hand.

But this is always the world you’ve lived in. And these are the ways you have behaved for decades, and the same things you would need to do if things had gone differently.

This doesn’t change how you need to behave or what you need to do. As you were.

 Severance by Ling Ma

Severance, no relation to the television show of the same name, won lots of awards. It ended up on various NYT Books of the Year type lists, and so it ended up on the stacks here at Bold Point. 

Severance, published in 2017, tells the story of Candice Chen, first generation Chinese-American as she navigates through her first real job, a few relationships, and the end of civilization at the hands of an infectious disease that originates in Shenzhen, China and wipes out most of humanity. The plague is a fungal infection (shades of The Last of Us) and it turns people into harmless zombies who just fall into the routine of doing their jobs while they rot away. When her (shitty) boyfriend leaves the city in order to try to find a more meaningful life as a writer, and encourages our protagonist to return to her photograpy, Candice lets him go and keeps working at her job, coordinating the manufacture of bibles in a factory in Shenzhen from her perch in NYC. As the world falls apart around her, she reflects on consumerism, brunches, $6 lattes, her troubled relationship with her mom, and the lengths that twenty-somethings in New York will go to to find some sense of meaning in life. 

After humanity ends, Candice falls in with a group of former office drones who take over a mall in the sorrowful Midwest and live there while she prepares to give birth to a baby. 

The novel works as none-to-subtle black humor on late stage capitalism. There are some interesting looks at modern NYC relationships, and the difficulties of generational-trauma on Millineal immigrant kids like Candice. And, of course, a "China Flu" that ends up wiping out civilization, written before 2017, before Covid, before... everything... feels vaguely prophetic. 

If I were to criticize Severance, and Mrs. Ma's novel, it would be only to say that the novel seems to offer no conclusions. Did Candice manage to escape her meaningless life in NYC as she dissapears into the abandoned Casbah of post-apocalpyse Chicago? Will her baby be born and spared the harsh tiger-mom criticism that seems to shape the lives of so many first generation Chinese women? (Better addressed in the magnificent Everything Everywhere All At Once.) In a world where mass affuence is coercising young people into doing meaningless jobs they hate - turning them into virtual zombies - in order to constantly buy things they don't really want... is the not-particularly-likeable boyfriend (with a dick like a "repulsive sea-cucumber") the one with the right answer: Turn on, tune in, drop out? 

Ma raises interesting questions, with a fun tounge-in-cheek narrative of office life and the post-apocalupse, but she doesn't really give us any satisfying conclusions to think about. Perhaps there are none. 

 Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

In the land near the Mississippi Delta the memories of Jim Crow cast long shadows. Ward tells us a tale of a boy, his sister, their meth addict mother, and their grandparents. To cynically describe this novel as yet-another-tale of a hardscrabble boyhood wouldn't be wrong. But there are ghosts! So that's interesting. 

Rascism is bad, mmmkay? And this novel reads a bit like the 2019 era atonement wave to which it belongs. Both chronologically and in temperment it feels like it belongs on a shelf near "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is a book in which we - as a country - and the author are trying to wrestle with our culture history of rascism, particularly in the Deep South. 

Ward's lyricsm is strong, if a bit overwroght often. The dialog rings mostly true, if a little bit too much like a modern grad student trying to capture how po' black folk be talkin' to they family.  The novel got a ton of praise, won awards aplenty, and Miss Ward teaches creative writing at Tulane. 

I worry that my support for the work in this review is sparser than it deserves, but I guess I'm not really sure what this adds to the body of literature on this topic (other than ghosts!) that Alice Walker, Toni Morrison (she got ghosts in Beloved!), and many many others haven't already said. But then, congratulations to Ward - I suppose if you can be mentioned in the same breath as legends like these, bravo! 

Words are the only victors.

 

 

7.17.2024

How could you create a city of legend?

Once upon a time there were cities of such renown that they attracted visitors from far and wide and developed nearly legendary reputation. The grandeur of great Rome, the Forbidden majesty of Beijing, the beautiful epoch of Paris, the tolerance and wealth of forgotten Bisnaga, the aspirational promise of New York, the byzantine bridge between continents of Constantinople, the countercultural promise of a new culture forming in San Francico, the stately pleasure of Xanadu, the desert licentiousness of Las Vegas.

Indeed, many of them survive today, though oft evolved beyond recognition, their original virtues visible now mostly in tourist kitsch.

So let’s say you wanted to take a nowheresville and somehow infuse it with the buzz that will create global awareness and a desire to visit?

What values or virtues would your aspiring Chamber of Commerce project seek to project?

How would you begin?

7.16.24

On the Life of Gods

Aside from orphans, almost everyone starts life with a firsthand experience of the presence of gods.

We spend time with them in our most formative first minutes, days, years, when they are luminescent and powerful beings. For most people, I believe these gods are benevolent creators of your universe. In some cases I suppose they are regrettably terrible, absent, cruel or worse. But most of us experience a deific presence in our lives for the first few years.

Then, later, we go through a period when the gods become slowly diminished, falliable, perhaps even out-of-touch and silly. In this, our adolescence, we are driven by biology and our peers to view our gods with a most critical eye. They disappear into the normal and take on the guises of everyday people. Gods who walk among us, go to work, stand in checkout lines. Often this makes us not very forgiving of their foibles. And of course, they have foibles – even gods do. And what a letdown this can be, to recognize that the all-powerful are not.

And in time, though lack of belief or some other atrophy of the fuel that powers the devine, Gods wane. They stoop, hunch, forget. We watch them fall into the powerlessness of a forgotten former god.

And then they are gone.             

---

Rushdie's amazing novel, Victory City, has me thinking about the lifecycle of the gods and goddesses of creation, the myths they inspire, the cities and worlds they dream into creation, and how these dreams are eventually forgotten...

 

7.14.24

I’m flying to Paris today, and that has me thinking about creativity and intellectualism and writers and poets and painters and all the rest. And specifically:

Why do some places develop an outsized reputation as a hotbed of creativity for a while other places never seem to be acknowledged for generating any of the creators who come from there?

Why is Paris or Austin branded in the public mind as cities for people who want to create, while places like, say, Minneapolis are noted only as a strange outlier when folks like Prince hail from there?

Let’s start with – in my mind – why Paris?

There’s a gallic tradition of intellectual ferment. For an (exhaustive) hagiography of this evolution, To The Finland Station offers a sort of James Burke “Connections” history, if not a real explanation for “Why there?”

I don’t know that this really explains why Paris in particular developed a reputation for being a mecca for artists, and particularly writers. I suppose all I’ve seen in my many visits there is a mecca for tourists and service-industry folks who are surly about having to serve them. But then, perhaps that’s just the nature of a tourist destination in a major city. And this week, between the Olympics – celebrating sport and athleticism rather than creative pursuit – and the recent French election, which seems to be interpreted as a triumph for the right wing, it’s hard to really feel much of whatever might have fueled this collective creative desire in centuries past.

So what about other places? Well… Florence during the Italian Renaissance is often spoken of in similar context. Silicon Valley in California gets love (and money!) as a place where creative entrepreneurs go to create machines of wealth generation (though not-so-much literature or art). When I was vising Beijing in 2015 there was a strong feeling of entrepreneureal energy and creative hustle – at the time I judged that from the inflow of massive amounts of capital, and the wild-west spirit of the Chinese internet at that time; my understanding is that the Party didn’t love it and so the party didn’t last. Austin, as I mentioned earlier, is associated with some talented filmmakers like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguiz, and certainly the “Slacker” creative spirit was strong there in the nineties; lots of us channeled that Birkenstock no-rules approach into making games. Since then it’s become part of the Austin brand, though I struggle to really name great creations that have emerged from there. SoHo, The Village, Atwood’s Toronto Alley, TinPan Alley, Berlin for a time, and a few other cities have all received a lot of love as centers for fostering works of creation in different fields at times.

Is the idea of a fertile creative hub city a romantic myth created after the fact as a sort of Chamber of Commerce branding to drive tourism? 

Austin certainly feels like that to me when I go back home.

In a few hours I’ll land in Paris, and I will look around for people actually MAKING things other than Aperol Spritzes. I’ll report back if I see any.

Vine and Fig Tree

 

7.13.24

My fellow Americans,

I’m here today to clear the air and clear the path for our nation to move forward into the future.

In 1973 I began proudly serving in the United States Senate. I remember still walking into that august chamber, can still hear the roar of legendary voices like Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmand, the great Ted Kennedy, Diane Feinstein. These men and women differed in their politics and their beliefs – and often their debates were heated - but they never differed in their common resolve to form a more perfect union.

I shared that conviction with them, and I carry that spirit with me now.

We men are imperfect creatures. Women too, though Jill might disagree with me on that.

We live but a short time, and all we can do is strive to use what time and strength we have to make the world a better place for those who come along after us.

In all, I have faithfully served my country for more than fifty years. And I believe we have made a powerful difference. Under the administration of my friend Barak Obama we brought healthcare to every American even while helping guide the country to a swift recovery after the financial collapse of 2008. On foreign shores we led our troops in the valiant fight against terror and made the world safer by ending the reign of Osama Bin Laden. We made sure that every American had the right to marry the person they loved in 2015. And we worked hard to combat the threat of climate change and a rapidly heating world.

Then, a few years later, I inherited an America that was hurting from a terribly managed pandemic that took too many from us. My predecessor had sewn division at home and among our allies abroad, fanning the flames of hatred on these shores and emboldening autocrats in Europe.

And as president, I rose to these challenges. My amazing team and I managed a soft landing to the economy. We increased jobs. We extracted American troops from Afghanistan. We worked with our allies in NATO to keep the world safe for democracy. I could not be more proud of what we have accomplished over the last four years.

We still have a lot to do.

As a nation, we face unprecedented complexities. Too many Americans still struggle to make ends meet. And overseas, in the Ukraine, in Palestine, and elsewhere, innocent civilians are too often forced to cower in fear. The ocean levels continue to rise, and I don’t need to tell the good people of Texas that it’s getting hotter every year.

We still have a lot to do.

I believe – I know – that I am committed to this challenge, ready to keep fighting that good fight until my last breath.

What we have to do is that important.

But leadership isn’t about me.

It’s never about the person who thinks only of themselves.

It’s about doing what is best for this great country we are trying to build, not about personal agendas.

And that’s why I’m announcing today that I will not run for a second term as President of the United States of America.

We have built a strong bench of great leaders who are ready to step up to the challenge of this land, of this world.

So rather than let our national – this global – discussion be about me and concerns for my age and health, I want us to return the discussion to something that matters more: the health of our country, our planet.

In the coming days, we will announce a new pair of Democratic leaders for the United States of America. And my team and I will stand behind this duo as they continue our essential mission.

George Washington, upon stepping down from his role as the first president of the United States reminded us of the scripture:

"Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

And based on what I understand is the will of the people, I shall do the same, unafraid in the knowledge that my administration is handing over the reigns to a strong country, and a world that is getting better to a wise and powerful team who will lead us into the next four years.

God Bless you all, and God Bless the United States of America.

 7.12.24

I'm trying to move my writing about technology to another place to keep this one focused on ideas that explore the creative impulse and, yep, books. 

https://texasmouse.substack.com/

 7.3.24

I find poetry difficult. It's a form of expression through wordplay, using the distance between precision and slipperiness in language to engage with thoughts and feelings. Feels like using words to create a shadow-box puppet in order to look at ideas. 

And it was said by Lazarus Long, "A man who reads his verse in public may have other nasy habits." So there's a certain cringiness associated with poetry in our culture, as if anyone who takes feelings and words seriously (even playfully!) is most assuredly not very well adjusted. 

Using playful words to describe the crocodiles that are approaching you in murky water isn't a respectable response; you're supposed to pretend you don't see them. 

 7.2.24

The Killing Floor

You've fallen into the Killing Floor now

The bad news is, that means your life will soon be over

The worse news is, it might not been as soon as you'd like

Your killer is not one you can possibly outsmart or defeat

The Killing Floor itself makes escape impossible because the walls are too high and there is nowhere to hide

Your murderer is what Gavin deBecker called a Process Predator

None of the specifics of your personality or nuance of your appearance matter to them

There is nothing you can say or scream out that will change their mind

(The screams excite them)

And it is the prolonged thrill of the hunt and slay that is their whole goal

I feel for you, though we are on opposite sides of this war

I side with your killer, though their cruelty disturbs me

Hopefully it will be quick for you, as painless as possible

I hope so

I'll give you a burial at sea, 

and in that moment at least one god will notice you

And then, like in that poem about children in a war zone

I hope when the game is over you get to start a new life

And then your killer will slink away, satisfied, proud even

And go to sleep beside her god

Making soft humming sounds to express her joy

Purring.

 

6.30.24

“Long weekend” is a phrase that irritates me. As did it this morning when a friend told me, “I’m off this week!”

What the hell does that even mean?

Does the sun cease to rise? Gravity takes a holiday? Will the precious minutes of your life stop slipping through your fingers this week?

I think not!

“If your job is your hobby you will never work another day in your life,” said someone like Steve Jobs or whomever. And this is commonly taken to mean that you should follow your passion and seek employment in a field that is interesting to you. But I think a better way of considering the matter is to parse out the ways you choose to spend time in accord with their value to you.

Perhaps it is the case that someone pays you to punch a clock, to devote some fixed number of hours to the conduct of a particular task. Let’s call this “your job.” And to the degree that this is a fixed commitment for a fixed amount of compensation without opportunity to achieve greater outcomes through the application of greater energy, I suppose it makes fine sense to devote only that time which is required.

However – I would strongly encourage people not to think of the time not spent on a job like that as “time off.” Instead, think of those hours or days when you are free to do other things as the real “time on” when you can actually do things that will improve your life, the lives of people you care about, or the world. Use that time to find a better “job” that yields greater return on time invested.

This is your life, and it is ending one minute at a time.

Make the most of those minutes.

Do not waste them.  

 

6.30.24

Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Charlie Munger, lifelong homie of Warren Buffet, sage of Value Investing, died in the last year.

And as part of generally trying to continue to deepen my thinking about – and understanding of – money, I decided to read Munger’s book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T Munger. It’s a collection of transcribed lectures and reflections upon them published in 2023.

Munger combines loads of homespun wisdom and virtue with a lot of insights into companies and business, and a whole lot of self-aggrandizing rants against various groups, most notably academics.

In its most useful moment’s Poor Charlie describes (several times) his framework for evaluating opportunities, which is a checklist structured formal sequence of lenses through which to contemplate a potential choice. These are as follows:

Circle of Competence: Munger emphasizes the importance of sticking to what you know. Understanding your own expertise and limitations helps in making informed decisions and avoiding risks. Only invest in opportunities that fall within your circle of competence.

Lollapalooza Effect: This framework involves identifying multiple factors that align to create a powerful outcome. Munger looks for opportunities where several favorable elements come together simultaneously, amplifying the potential for success.

Inversion Thinking: Instead of only considering how to succeed, Munger also thinks about how to avoid failure. By identifying and avoiding potential pitfalls and problems, you can improve your chances of making a successful investment.

Opportunity Cost: Munger always considers the opportunity cost of an investment—what you give up by choosing one option over another. This helps in assessing whether the potential returns of an opportunity are worth the risks and resources involved.

Margin of Safety: This principle involves investing in opportunities where the intrinsic value significantly exceeds the current market price, providing a cushion against errors in judgment or unforeseen events. This conservative approach helps mitigate risk and secure better long-term returns.

A good list, and I do not doubt for a moment that approaching most everything in life with a clear prioritized checklist for evaluating things would lead to consistently highly quality results.

At its worst moments, Poor Charlie reads like an old man ranting, repeating the same corn-pone homilies (“one legged man in an ass kicking contest”) over and over, and smugly pointing out how much smarter he is than all those ivy-league eggheads.

But I enjoyed getting to know Munger, and will definitely attempt to make more formal use of his framework.

 

6/25/24

And since I am not a unique and beautiful snowflake, it is almost a guarantee that a desire to find alternative solutions to the traditional and caring way of helping provide companionship for aging parent is writ large on our culture.

So maybe CloudCare will work because there are hundreds of millions of people who, in the immortal words of Phobe Buffet “wish-they-could but don’t want to” give a dementia patient (or just someone aging in the normal fashion) their full attention all the time?

After all, “A Place for Mom” is the name of a successful line of care facilities, which are popular and well-run and good for patients by all accounts.

And, of course, jobs and culture and the modern economy of late-stage-capitalism is such that most people cannot end up taking on the traditional (in some cultures) youngest-daughter role and looking after their parents their whole lives.

It is possible that Confucian values are not just out-of-vogue, but also impossible for many in a world of seven billion people with life expectancies as long as they are?

 6.27.24

I finally started Rushdie's Victory City this week. What a treat! More soon.

 

6.24.24

Filial piety. Confucian values. Honor thy father and thy mother.

Is focusing on trying to create a technological solution to help patient’s suffering from dementia a sort of pathetic middle-aged look-ma-no-hands tech bro atonement?

Throughout my youth and until I was around forty I constantly tried to bring technology into the house where I’d grown up and deploy it because I thought it would work well for people there. Upon reflection, I did the same thing at my father’s law firm, acting as the IT department during my teenage years.

I’d come over in my twenties and set up a new stereo or try to get a new printer or early networking equipment operational in their house. Remember those photo frames that would display low-rez digital pictures off a stick of RAM back when early digital cameras were thing? I’m sure there were several of those delivered to parents and grandparents alike.

And invariably all of this shit would end up in a corner gathering dust, unused, not-quite-working, because cutting edge tech (except for Apple products in the last decade) requires users who can fiddle with it until it works. And they all require someone to actually give a fuck about whatever it is supposed to do. And the digital native tech-utopian folks like me see these things and somewhat intuitively are able to cobble together an ecosystem where they work. But for people who aren’t like that, they are just quirky, expensive pieces of plastic and circuitry. And so they don’t work well, never become integrated into life, and they get pushed into a corner to create overpriced condos for spiders and their webs.

I expect I’m not the only person in my age cohort with this experience. So Best Buy dutifully sells a new batch of consumer facing electronics each year, which are joyfully given to parents and grandparents and for Christmas or birthdays, and set up while smoke from blown-out candles still fills the kitchen, usually probably with a faint whiff of annoying techno-superiority by the giver, who not so patiently tries to explain why the luddite recipient just doesn’t quite understand how cool this new whatever is.

It’s pretty easy to see the underlying psychology behind all of this, and it’s pretty easy to see why mostly (always?) these sorts of installations didn’t work:

Because who wants cold technological solutions to replace the attention paid them by the humans they love?

It’s easy to imagine that this whole thing is just some overly-complicated way of dealing with post Vic grief and guilt?

If so, is that the worst thing?

I guess people create things for lots of reasons.

 6.22.24

Nine years ago we said goodbye to my father after a long losing battle with Alzheimer’s disease. But saying goodbye wasn’t the worst part; the years leading up to that were. Dementia slowly locks a person in a lonely and increasingly fearful, isolating state as their life grinds to a close. And the toll of this degradation of a patient’s mind is every bit as destructive to the people who love them. I watched my mom and my brother give everything they had and more to providing compassionate reassurance and comfort. The sense of loss that grows daily and the helpless exhaustion that caretakers for memory loss patients can be overwhelming.

This journey was chronicled by the aptly titled book The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementing Illnesses, and Memory Loss by Nancy Mace and Peter Rabins. I read the book at the time to better understand what my family members who lived with Vic were going through. And then I read the literature on how many families around the globe were going to experience this over the coming decades. The demographic shift in much of the world is now upon us and the next fifty years will be hugely defined by our cultures learning to cope with aging populations without enough children and caretakers for them all.

In 2014 I decided that there must be a way to use some of the massive technology we were developing for video games to help.

At the time, I thought that the Kinect, with its innovative ability to identify different users when they entered the room, and some of its primitive voice commands were a proof that we could build intelligent devices and systems that could engage with memory loss patients and at least offer them a kind voice, never run out of patience, maybe help them so they didn’t have to stare dumbly at a DVD player (we still used those then!) and wonder how they could watch a favorite show. I thought that maybe we could hack together something between a Kinect and Amazon’s (then primitive) Alexa to help spell the exhausted caretakers and provide kind companionship to alleviate my Dad’s loneliness.

I’ve visited about this desire, this potential technology with many of you over the last decade. Thanks to so many of you for the great ideas on these topics. And I have learned from Altzheimer’s researches at UC Berkeley, owners of memory care facilities around the country and the world, and heard a thousand inspiring and heartbreaking stories from many of you who have also lost loved ones to this disease, or found yourselves exhausted by trying to live the 36-Hour Day looking after them.

In 2021 we founded a company to start a formal R&D effort to apply technologies we used to develop games to this problem. MainBrain. We wrote whitepapers on Natural Language Processing, bespoke language models, custom companion avatar creation from descriptions or photographs, hardware and software considerations. We worked with the Canadian Digital Innovation labs, with doctors, with memory care operators. With what small money we could afford to hire people to develop software we started building CloudMind.

It was clear that the rise of LLMs would massively accelerate our efforts, and it has.

Now, finally, this coming week, we will deploy our first pilot test of CloudCare into three different memory care facilities in North America.

Last night, setting up data for our first ten patients and their caregivers, I felt the chill of excitement and fear; these are real people; this is really happening; we have really finally reached a point to try to use our paltry magics to try to help.

Our first companion, Cathy, will only engage with about ten memory care “residents” and their caretakers. This is another tiny step on a long journey to help (in some small way) address a massive problem.

But our goal remains the same:

We will use consumer facing technologies that we developed for games to help people around the world.

I know that I do not have the money, the mind, or the skills to help the hundreds of millions of people who will suffer through dementia in the next decade. But there is a story my sister is fond of telling me.

I’ve asked Cathy to relate it to me here:

The story of the starfish dying on the beach and the girl who says, "at least I helped this one," is a well-known parable that illustrates the impact of individual actions. Here is the story:

One day, a man was walking along a beach covered with thousands of starfish that had been washed ashore. As he walked, he saw a little girl picking up starfish one by one and throwing them back into the ocean.

Curious, the man approached her and asked, "Why are you doing this? There are so many starfish. You can't possibly make a difference."

The girl picked up another starfish, gently threw it back into the water, and replied, "I made a difference to that one."

The story highlights the importance of individual efforts and how small actions can have a meaningful impact, even if they don't solve the entire problem. It emphasizes that every effort counts and can make a significant difference to those affected.

So this coming week, with CloudCare we will help these ten and their caretakers.

And hopefully someone can take what we will learn and use it to help millions.  

 6.18.24

I've been reading Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger this week. He instructs each of us to have a collection of "models" we use in analyzing choices. (Investment choices, yes, but others too.) His use of "models" corresponds a bit to the idea of "lenses" that have become popular to talk about in the last decade. 

For reflection. Here are ten of the most important models according to his philosophy:

1. Inversion: Thinking about what you want to avoid or prevent can help you identify the right course of action. Instead of asking "How can I achieve success?" ask "How can I avoid failure?"

2. Occam's Razor: Simplest solutions are often the best. Avoid overcomplicating problems with unnecessary variables.

3. Probability: Understanding basic probability is crucial for decision-making. This includes Bayes' Theorem for updating probabilities based on new evidence.

4. Opportunity Cost: Every choice has a cost. Understanding what you’re giving up by choosing one option over another helps in making better decisions.

5. Circle of Competence: Stick to what you know best. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses helps you avoid mistakes.

6. Mr. Market: Treat the stock market as an erratic entity offering opportunities, rather than a guide to intrinsic value. This helps maintain emotional stability in investing.

7. Margin of Safety: Always allow for error. This principle, borrowed from engineering, helps mitigate risk.

8. Reciprocity: People tend to return favors. Understanding this principle helps in building and maintaining relationships.

9. Confirmation Bias: Recognize the tendency to seek information that confirms your preconceptions. Being aware of this helps in seeking out contradictory evidence.

10. Lollapalooza Effect: When multiple biases and tendencies combine to produce an extreme outcome. Recognizing this helps in understanding how small factors can lead to significant effects.

These models come from various disciplines, including psychology, economics, mathematics, and engineering, and help in approaching problems from multiple perspectives.

ChatGPT assembled this list for me in less than 3 seconds. 

So that's interesting too. 

 

6.18.24

And then two weeks pass without an update. Habits are easy to break just as they are easy to establish. I’ve been reading a lot, working on a couple of projects, having some interesting discussions, thinking a lot though I’ve not necessarily created anything amazing in the last two weeks.

The Ferryman by Justin Cronin

Mr. Cronin’s novel, The Passage, got some ridiculously large advance, if I recall correctly. And it’s the book of his most people know him by, I believe. The Ferryman is his newest, available (30% off!) in paperback in grocery stores near you; at least if you live near Campbell River, BC.

The protagonist is a ferryman who takes people to be recycled into their next life. And things start getting weird for him as the strange capitalist utopia he lives in is revealed to be not-quiet what he thought it was. By the back quarter of the book things have gone properly off the rails and we are introduced to what’s really going on. I won’t spoil it for you. Think of this as a wanna-be smart person’s beach read. There are a few interesting ideas (well trod turf all) half-heartedly developed and then consumed by action sequences and near-constant scene jumps that feel like an homage to Chris Nolan’s later work.

 

6.3.2024

I’m thinking about the voices of the witches that drip poison in your mind at night, telling you that you cannot, that you should not try, that everyone is eager to watch you fail. Where do these voices come from?

I’m not the first person to wonder about this, but I’m not sure I know of anyone with good answers.

“When we all fall asleep where do we go?”

How do the most successful people silence the internal voices of dissent and keep focused on their goals? 

It's no big news to those who know me that I hate being told "no." Broadly speaking, I believe firmly in the old saying, "Tell me if you can or if you cannot; either way you are right." 

And just as there seems to me a fundamental divide within the human species between those who are always game to try to do something, to say, "That's crazy. Okay, HOW do we do it?" and those who are quick to point out a hundred reasons any effort "will never work." Invariably, those in the former camp lead grand and interesting lives filled with accomplishments, and those in the latter camp never accomplish much of anything. 

Why not? 

Because they are allowing the voices of the witches of negativity to constantly poison them against taking any action for fear of all the ways it might go wrong. And so, they basically do nothing for fear of failure. 

Someone wise said to me once, "It is the easiest thing in the world to be a voice of obstruction, to point out the reasons some course of action will never work, because mostly, they are right. Many things do not work!" And yet, at the same time, some humans DO accomplish things in this life. They create things, change the world, sometimes even for the better. (Indeed, the generalized arc of human history IS continuing to improve the lives of billions.) 

And so, I don't know how change your life to be guaranteed passage through each night without the voices of the circling witches poisoning your desire to try. 

But I DO know how important it is not to listen to them. And not to give undue weight to the people in your lives constantly telling you to do nothing, because all courses may run ill.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

What else is there to do?