On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

I remember a time when there was a just a few sources for news. When I was growing up there was the local newspaper, three television networks and magazines like Time (read in waiting rooms). Even after we got cable while I was in High School, CNN was nothing more than expanded, 24 hour a day news channel much like the news on regular TV or from the newspaper. Journalists tried to provide information that was at least confirmed and had been filtered through the prevailing notions of the time. Even if the reporting wasn’t always completely accurate and even it was somewhat biased by political or financial considerations, it was a received truth that created a common world view for citizens. If ther was a single point of view at least it was everyone’s.

In their book Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel present the case that individuals now have to take on that role for themselves. With more and more primary information available, understanding an issue now involves searching out multiple sources on the net, synthesizing a personal view. This may be as simple as avoiding the trap of one sided presentation of a situation and searching out other reports to verify or perhaps present a more nuanced picture.

The presidential campaigns have raised fundamental questions about the US, its role in the world and its future. I’m finding much of the conversation to be unconvincing from all sides. Some of the changes to tax policy, trade pacts and immigration are quite radical with potentially far-reaching unintended consequences. Of course, in line with the ideas described in Blur, I’ve been reading multiple sources, opinion across the spectrum and fact checking if possible.

Some of the questions I have are pushing me towards reading some political science, economics and history a bit more in depth order to understand context. For example, I just finished Martha Nussbaum’s Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality. Why is political economy relevant to Deciding Better? It’s an example of a complex system. The constitution provides a framework and set of rules. The actor within create an ecology of ideas that govern real events. Even constitutional rights are fluid and changeable. These ideas of tolerance and free exercise have changed over time with fear being a major driver of minority rights being infringed.

Besides my work with the (M Monochrome)[https://decidingbetter.com/?p=783], I’ve shot and developed 10 rolls of film this year. I’ll probably get one or two more developed before the end of the calendar year.

It’s fair to ask why I chose to shoot film side by side with digital. I think if you look through my (Flickr Photostream)[https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesvornov/] you’d be hard pressed to pick out film from digital in the images. I treat them as equivalent except for the incredible low light sensitivity you can now get with digital capture that ASA 400 Tri-X can’t match. Once film is scanned, I treat it similarly in the workflow, so film just has a few extra steps compared to digital. Price is not a consideration when buying bricks of Tri-X and doing the developing and scanning at home.

So why film? Authenticity in the photographic process, I think. At this point, once an image is in the digital realm, the tools we have to alter the image are so powerful that the digital file is a starting point, not the object itself. With the techniques I’ve learned over the years, I can infuse light into a flat image, creating a subjective reality for the viewer that is only suggested by the original scene.

Film provides me with an opportunity to let the chemical photographic process do that manipulation of light to image in its time honored way, providing a starting point that is much closer to the end product. My relationship to a scanned film image is different. I adjust brightness and contrast, sharpen the image back up to what its lost in the scanning process and present it more or less as I found it.

The image above was captured on a gray winter day. I scheduled myself to spend a few hours capturing images on film and came home with two rolls exposed, unimpressed by what I had seen. Shooting film, I lacked the feedback provided by the camera LCD, so its a matter of looking, composing and capturing. This image reminds me how much a scene is transformed by its capture to film. This for me is the authentic experience of the photographic process and its linked to the magic of the chemical emulsion and wonders that D-76 works on Tri-X.

Recognize that we don’t live in a clockwork universe. The future cannot be known based on the current state of the system. Uncertainty is fundemental.

Complexity . . . occurs when the number of interactions between components increases dramatically . . . The density of interactions means that even a relatively small number of elements can quickly defy prediction.
Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

On one of the Sunday morning news shows, Hugh Hewitt proclaimed that Team of Teams was “transformative”. Hewitt interviewed McChrystal about the book and how fighting a new type of enemy in Iraq, one that was decentralized and adaptable, caused him to question traditional military thinking. It turns out that McChrystal has been deeply influenced by systems thinking and complexity theory, just as I have over the years. He uses Emergence by Steven Johnson as reference point which was one my introductions to the field. I’d recommend Steven Strogatz’ Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life as another good way to get into the ideas of how higher order structure can be created by independent working parts.

I agree with Hewitt that Team of Teams is a great introdruction to chaos and complexity theory. Written by a man of some accomplishment, it provides a real view as to why complexity matters in the world and how to deal with uncertainty in getting the work done.

The book outlines the shift in McChrystal’s thinking and management style from top down command structure to distributed team work. One might argue that this merely mirrors broad shifts in how we work across many industries. In drug development, as in software development, small focused teams have become the norm. The value in Team of Teams is the somewhat scholarly background into history and theory, from Taylor to Lorenz to Kahneman.

In my review of 168 Hours I focused on the idea of taking stock of how one spends the weekly gift of 168 new hours. But how do you choose how to spend those hours once time like sleep and work are budgeted? If that time is going to as rewarding as possible, somehow you must find your passion and distinguish between activities that bring fulfillment and those that are of no value.

All decisions are emotional. Deciding how to spend time is no less personal and subjective. What is a joy for one person is a bore for another. Even within the same sphere of activity, the same work might be trivial for the experienced practitioner but impossible for the novice.

As a guide to “what”, Vanderkam suggests looking backward as to what activities had that magnetic attraction over the years. What do you find draws you back over and over? In fact, according to Vanderkam, we usually start in childhood. The child who loved to perform may find joy in an audience as an adult, whether it’s in community theater or in front of a class teaching. The childhood mud pie maker will be happiest with dirty hands their whole life whether as an artist, knitter or programmer deep in code.

I love the idea of adults as grownup versions of the children we once were, seeking the same basic satisfaction throughout life. It’s consonant with my observation that over the years people don’t change at their core. Over many years we are at our happiest engaged in the work of our souls.

Me? I’m a student. Mentally, I never graduated. After a BA it was an MD and PhD. Then Neurology training followed by another 10 years on a medical school faculty: still in school, learning more than I ever produced as a researcher. Even now after almost 20 years of working for a living as a drug developer, I’m in it for what I can learn. My writing here? Just another mode of learning for me.

One of my discoveries this year was Coursera as a resource for learning. During the year, I completed the full Data Science Specialization which was created by faculty at Hopkin’s own Bloomberg School of Public Health. Coursera does it right. These are courses with quizzes, projects, and deadlines. Once a course started, I had to be committed, sometimes spending many, many hours on a course project. The result? I’m now reasonably proficient in the statistical programming language R, many of its add on packages and the IDE, R Studio.

Understanding how to manipulate, display and analyze data is a useful skill set for me, of course. That’s why I’m learning about data science, not physics. But the joy for me is in the learning, the mastery of a body of knowledge. I’m continuing to look at my 168 hours each week and budget a nice chunk to exploring data analysis and statistics in a curriculum I’m designing myself.

It’s worthwhile to step, see where the time goes and try to set some of it aside for doing what you truly love.

My photography has taken a major turn back toward black and white. Like others of my generation, I started with film in the 1980’s, developing and printing in the darkroom of the lab where I did my PhD. At some point in the digital Photoshop-enabled era, my images became saturated color depictions of the suburban landscape. I’ve gone back to embrace my roots in formal, somewhat abstract black and white images. Still of course depicting light with the techniques I learned from Vincent Versace in his Welcome to Oz books.

While my earliest art photography influence was Ansel Adams, my earliest love of images was the macro photographs in My Weekly Reader. The transformation of objects by the process of photography has stuck with me. I’m now exploring just how far I can go with the idea.

Black and white photography provides maximum abstraction. I’d been meaning to shoot black and white film for a long time. I finally bought a tank and chemicals, loading the film at night in a closet with the room lights off. Once again I was greeted with the magic of light transformed to physical image. I’m trading off between film and digital, but mostly staying with a 50mm lens which I find helps isolate and abstract scenes.

Get it here: 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

Laura Vanderkam has written a great book encouraging us to think deeply about how we spend our time. As Vanderkam points out, everyone gets the same 168 hours in their week. We’re gifted with a new week 52 times a year, each with the same number of hours. Looking at the week as a bucket with a fixed number of hours, each hour, its value, is brought into sharp focus. In general, 56 hours are spent sleeping, leaving a full 112 hours available. When I was working at an office, I had 40 hours committed office time plus about 5 hours of commuting. This leaves a full 67 hours for family, fitness, spiritual, artistic and intellectual pursuits. But you can spend those 67 on valued activities only if you refrain from squandering those riches.

In January of this year I returned to work with a Contract Research Organization on the service side of drug development after a two year stint as Chief Medical Officer at a biotech. Personally, this meant going back to a home office where I manage my own activities most of the time. There’s a wider variety of projects now and much more unstructured time outside of a more formal office setting. That flexibility has allowed me to pursue some projects biostatistics and neuroscience in addition to regular work responsibility.

Without feedback, there is no learning. I’m an pragmatist and the world is a data source, life an ongoing experiment. I’ve used many systems over the years, trying to refine the tracking process to suit current activities. Sometimes tracking needs to be granular, other times it’s the timely progress to big events like completing a clinical trial. I think it always comes down to choosing a unit of time and looking both back over what did and did not happen and forward to what can be done in the next unit of time. I generally operate at the level of quarters (3 months), weeks, and days. This book really helped me up my game in the area of time commitment.

168 Hours is a book with a big idea, lots of illustrations, examples, and anecdotes, but also an action plan. Just like a food diary is the best way to loose weight and a budget is the best way to save money, time tracking is the best way to gain control of how those hours are spent. I’ve refined my time tracking, but more with an eye toward focusing on the work that inspires.

Highly Recommended

“Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experiencd them. We carve hisory from totalities beond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.”
– Lowbeer

The Peripheral by William Gibson

What a nice statement of how we condense complex reality down to simple ideas. A few words provide a tool to manipulate ideas with the same ease as real objects. But often we forget that there is a reality behind the handle. In Gibson’s latest book, reviewed here, hackers from the future manipulate the past, creating alternate versions of history. Because the manipulation of their past make these worlds causally disconnected from those doing the manipulation, they become like fictional worlds, not at all real, and without consequences.

If we forget that our words are handles and not reality, we risk making mistakes by neglecting the consequences that come from action on complex systems. These interactions are not eliminated by using words; the map is not the terrain.

The reverse is true as well. In order to understand “totalities beyond our grasp”, we must reduce them to handles and map out the concepts. Doing the work and writing it down is the best aid to comprehension I know. I’m pleased to share the process here on ODB.

The Peripheral gives us a William Gibson that I’ve missed since The Diamond Age. As in earlier work, Gibson conflates the real and virtual worlds, allowing characters to move between physical reality and computer constructed virtual reality. When he did this in the 90’s, at the birth of the internet it was prophetic. I hope the The Peripheral isn’t as accurate a prediction of how reality might be controlled from the virtual world.

Here, Gibson uses virtualization to show how an entire world, economy and government in particular, might become a target of hackers with the right data and technology. The hackers happen to be 70 years in the future, using a mysterious Chinese server that provides a data connection into the past. Using a multiverse solution to time travel logical contradictions, the past becomes a stub. Thus the future doing the manipulation is necessarily different than the future of the manipulated world. It’s someone else’s future, and so without causal connection to those making the changes. Entire worlds can become virutual instances of reality with no consequences to the hacking. With his disarming, breezy, and venacular writing, Gibson provides a good story and enough philosophical contemplation of the information age to be worth the read.

Gibson moves a bit too far toward mind transfer, which I think is an impossibility. He allows devices that paralyze the user and transmit intention to peripheral devices. A band across the forehead allows sensation and intention to be transmitted. Gibson then goes beyond simple body control to allow new motor programs with novel ability to somehow also be remote.

In a theory of embodied mind, thought can’t be separated from the physicality of brain, from the sensorium and motor activity. Virtualization and remote action is clearly possible by transmitting sensory input and motor output back an forth. But thoughts and intent would have to found, transmitted and translated to allow remote thought control of a peripheral. It’s the kind of creeping dualism that’s allowed by theories of mind that separate thought from brain, but our current understanding of neuroscience appears to make this impossible. There’s no independent reality to thought; the activity leading to thought is not encoded, it just is the activity. One would have to transmit the brain itself which of course defeats the purpose of transmitting thought without the brain present. Fortunately, I enjoy science fiction stories about uploading minds or thought control of devices enough that I suspend disbelief and act as reader, not neuroscientist.

I don’t recall where I heard about Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I was either researching running or researching the role of habit in decision making. I know had just finished Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, but he doesn’t mention Murakami’s book about the running habit. Perhaps it was just time to meet Haruki Murakami through his essay and fiction.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running consists of diary like description of how Murakami lives, particularly his relationship to running and to writing. His reflections on how to live the creative life provide a view into the process of building the habit of art in an examined life. If running is what you do or if art is what you do, then there’s no need to approach making art or running. Lace up your shoes, grab your camera, or start typing. What you produce is just the result of living, not a product.

It makes sense that making a habit of art would both be freeing and an aid to stress-free work. We now know the brain relies on predetermined sequences of behavior to free up resources for activies that really require executive supervision. There’s no need to think about most of what we do. Coming from different directions, both Duhigg and Murakami make the point that the living the examined life must include the tracking and adjustment of habit. The feedback provided by uncovering our rituals allows those rituals to be adjusted in ways that move us toward our chosen goals. Being present may be recording what we eat in a food diary to be aware of caloric intake and nutrution or or it may be the creation of the time, space and environment to create.

Having spent some pleasant time learning from Murakami how improve my creative output, I felt I owed him a read of one of his books in return. I remembered hearing about his novel 1Q84 so I took advantage of our public library’s ever improving ebook system to read it on my Kindle. Wanting more, I read his latest: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

Murakami’s novels are often described as dreamlike as they freely mix reality with fantastic elements. I don’t think the comparison to dreams is quite right, since dreams are generally without logic, reflecting internal states not bound by the structure of experience. What Murakami does is blur the boundry between the world “out there” and the feelings and fantasy we have “in here”, hypothetical states percieved in the mind only. In both books, Murakami plays with the uncertainty we have regarding the feelings and perceptions of others, an uncertainty that multiplies the possibilities of what may be true. These other people “out there” each have their own world of perception inside their heads. Those worlds are all “in there”, inaccessible to any one else unless they provide clues through action or words.

Fiction of this quality provides a guided experience into other ways to see, trading our thoughts for those of the author, presented in the guise of story and fictional character. Our own lives are necessarily limited in the world as it is “out there”, limiting the experience to shape how we see “in here”. Murakami allows us to journey to worlds that might be. Upon my return from these worlds, I’m open to a broader range of possibility, allowing more meaning in my own perception of the world.

Steven Pinker has studied cognitive phenomenon from a neuropsychological perspective, probing brain mechanisms by examing visual perception and speech. Simply by strongly arguing that languange is a specific, inborn human cognitive ability like vision, he places thinking as the result of brain function and structure rather than taking place in an abstract world of mind. His writing has been central to the school of thought I think of as “embodied mind”.

Beginning in 1994 with The Language Instinct, Pinker wrote accessable yet rigorous presentations of his views on brain, mind and cognitive phenomenon. Most important for my way of thinking was the idea that cognitive abilities tend to be adaptations of more fundamental physical precepts, grounding symbols as real perceptions, but in an internal representation that allows abstraction from the purely physical.

Compared to his previous books, The Sense of Style is more light weight from a theoretical perspective, but interesting as a practical application of neuropsychology and philosophy. There is always as sense that writing is a way to pattern other minds, so that written language should use cognitive structure to be most effective. For example, in discussions of sentence structure, the linear nature of sentence parsing is emphasized, with advice to prevent misleading the reader with punctuation misdirection. Sentences should be presented with the heaviest last to lead the thoughts of the reader from the given to the new. Much of this echoes advice from writers past, but we now see it from the cognitive perspective rather than from the “this is what works from my experience” view.

For my writing here at ODB, I took to heart the need to present work in “consistent thematic strings”, laying out a topic then supporting it with concepts that explain, enrich or comment on the thought. In The Sense of StyePinker emphasizes the need to refer to any particular idea in a consistent manner to build the reader’s ability to keep track of that idea as a single symbolic entity. Writing a blog as a “coherent text” is a huge challenge because of it’s episodic nature. A blog can’t be fully architected with an outline, it flows as a long discourse. Perhaps hypertext techniques are one solution to this problem. Links to previous writing can enforce a kind of discipline to create at least an emergent structure. This is difficult with a simple string of posts in a web content system like WordPress. Some organization of blog posts with notes like Tinderbox or in plain text a Zettelkasten system is probably necessary behind the scenes as a means of organizing the emergent structure of this style of writing.

In the end, The Sense of Style fulfills its purpose as a style manual for the 21st century. Its based on cognitive science and real world usage, not myths and formalisms. The final section, “Telling Right from Wrong” provides lists of usage advice, but turns more discursive and is often incomplete, feeling like a bit of a compromise in structure. As a two part book- a history and exposition on style and then some examples it succeeds well enough.