On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

No idea is really bad, unless we are uncritical. What is really bad is to have no idea at all”

I’v just finished the first volume of George Polya’s books on how to solve problems, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, Volume 1: Induction and Analogy in Mathematics. I picked up these books, published in 1954 after Jaynes pointed them out as foundational in his book Probability Theory. Jaynes has a relative short, straightforward introduction to these concepts, but reading Polya is a delight because these books were aimed at helping math teachers guide their students into understanding how to do mathematics. As Polya points out through mathematical examples and problem sets, we solve problems by coming up with reasonable conjectures about the answer, exploring the consequences of the conjecture, collecting supportive or contradictory evidence, and some times coming to a certainty, a proof of the conjecture.

I’m still, in parallel, working my way through the Jaynes book. This all was triggered by my editing of the On Deciding . . . Better manuscript and realizing I needed to understand the basis of probabilistic reasoning. While Polya was interested in teaching mathematics and Jaynes was interested in correcting some of the errors of reasoning that had been introduced into the practice of statistics, I’m interested in how the brain performs it’s remarkable feats of inference, taking raw sensory input and creating an internal model that reflects the real physical world and the semantic world that we uniquely occupy as humans.

I’ll admit I’m in no hurry to complete these digressions into probability and plausible reasoning, but I do want to get onto another area that I don’t feel I fully grasp, the concepts of cybernetics and system control that were being expressed during the same period as Jaynes and Polya were working. Sadly, I think the lessons they learned were forgotten during periods of great advances in technology and biology, but have emerged again as relevant now that our technology has revealed to us that reductionism reaches explanatory limits when we deal with complexity and emergent phenomena.

These issues are at the root of my long interest in deciding better. Decisions would be easy if were not for the uncertainty we must deal with when the future is not predictable. Decisions would be easy if all values really were denominated in dollars. But our real world is complex and unpredictable. And our values are ill defined and full of conflicting principles. What is truly remarkable to me is that the brain deals with this uncertaintly seamlessly. And for the most part, chooses appropriate action that we understand only on reflection.

In 2023 so far, I’ve finished 23 books so far, 9 of which are non-fiction, the rest fiction. I just updated the Reading 2023 page to get it up to date. I’ve never kept such close track before, but the number seems about on par with my usual pace.

I finished Nefesh HaChaim last week, a project that began in November 2022. I read Hebrew plus English every morning for about 15 minutes, taking full notes on the book line by line. Lately, I added a short summary at the bottom of each page to facilitate review. I also filled my second notebook dedicated to the Jewish study of what we call Mussar, which is a path to self-improvement. Nefesh HaChaim is recognized as a somewhat mystical, philosophical book a man’s purpose and how to direct one’s life accordingly. Lots of what I think of as “celestial mechanics”, detailing the relationship between God, the spiritual worlds and our world of illusion.

My next book is a famous practical Mussar book, Cheshbon HaNefesh. Cheshbon means “accounting” and is a short methologicical book of how to improve and clarify the process of thought and create good habits of mind. These are both themes that have emerged as central to the idea of “Deciding Better”, so a very appropriate read at this point.

My attempted adjustment to read more nonfiction was a failure. Since reading Jaynes on Probability is real focused work, I thought I could add more non-fiction. I read through the very nice When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut which really straddles fiction/non-fiction, but then got stuck trying to read George Polya’s book Mathematics and Plausible Reaoning. I got the idea to read Polya from Jaynes and it’s a great read. It’s just too dense a read to be a leisure activity. So I need to tee up some more easy non-fiction reading in creativity or biography which was where I was going in the beginning of the year.

So it’s back to some nice fiction reading, having just finished Trust and starting Babel by R.F. Kuang.

There’s been a good bit more reading and looking in the realm of photography and image making, including a reread of Vincent Versace’s Oz books and the very nice How I Make Photographs based on Joel Meyerowitz’ online course. I found my notes on some photobooks I’d read a few years ago- also revisiting the notes and the books. I’ve learned a bit about my body of work, looking at images with a broader perspective, trying to get out of the Flickr photo stream state of mind.

My Sniff and Shoot process is working out well. I’m collecting a lot of images mostly in the morning and late afternoon when there’s nice broken illumination. I return to the same subjects over and over, but of course the time, quality of light, angle of illumination and my experience of the scene allows for deep exploration that so far keeps me motivated.

It’s interesting to be working this dual workflow on my images. After they are imported into Capture One, I do a cull for interest and focus then do a quick set of casual adjustments to see what it “might” look like. Of course, as with this image the casual version is pretty nice. But I can see where I could improve the image by shifting tones around a bit to emphasize the light and the shapes that struck me when I captured the image.

This Leica M11 Monochrom creates these interesting images right out of the camera with minimal processing, but that’s the camera speaking through my impulse. It’s afterwards that I get to focus and refine the presentation so that the impulse becomes more focused and obvious in the final image.

A more prosaic approach to the intimate landscape.

The current project has turned into building a portfolio. I’m guided by some brief remarks Joel Meyerowitz makes at the very end of the book How I Make Photographs. He describes his process of culling a shoot down to the “keepers”, but then creating a group of images that are enjoyable to look at and inform the process of the current work. It’s great advice and wish I had figured it out sooner. I’ve been living in the photo stream approach of Flickr and Instagram which promote constant production, not reflective progression.

There’s a nice email service called Refind that sends a few links to interesting web articles every morning. It’s a nice broad discovery mechanism, being something of a substitute for some of the links I used to find on Twitter.

This morning, this discussion of website niche development had me thinking:

The perils of niching down:

The most ubiquitous piece of advice in the creator economy is to niche down. Immerse yourself in one subculture. Pick a topic. Own it. Specialize. Become known for one thing.

This advice is everywhere because in many ways, it works. Internet media is noisy and competitive, and it’s easier to earn attention when your work is hyper-specialized. When you’re focused on a single subculture or topic, marketing and monetization become more controllable and predictable. If your goal is to create things online, and earn a living in a somewhat reliable fashion, niching down is a smart bet.

I’ve always felt a pull to make this site more focused to build some kind of audience outside of my internet friends and those who come here through a handful of search terms that I happen to rank high on at Google, but stick to the idea that it’s my personal online journal and just reflects my current set of interests, reflected here more or less as time permits.

Interesting to read then:

Over the last few years, I’ve met a surprising number of creators who were outwardly successful, with thriving businesses, but who felt trapped and resentful. They followed all the best practices, niched down, created what they thought their audience wanted, etc. And while it often “worked” for generating income, it rarely resulted in them feeling alive, authentic, connected, free. In fact, it led to the opposite. A feeling of deadness, disconnection from self and others, and a perceived loss of agency and freedom.

I’ve written before how I prefer to read reports of tools and techniques by those who use them in a real way for real purposes. So much of this web niching leads to a kind of navel gazing where the tools are used only for the purpose of posting about the tools. Every time a writer I enjoy quits the day job to run their site, I know that in not too long I’ll lose anything but cursory interest. Since I’ve been working on my photography lately, I’ll point to people like Thom Hogan who runs a big site, writes great books, but is a working photographer both leading trips- where he works too and doing commercial work. So too we get the insights of Vincent Versace and Greg Williams both of whom produces their own personal and commercial work. I admire the work and technique, so take the advice seriously.

It seems to me that the passion to create can’t get subsumed in the marketing and meta-talk about the creating. At its heart is the work and Rob Hardy is right that at the heart of creativity is the freedom to pursuit the paths that the work suggests, not service an audience you’ve created in the short term. It is indeed a long game.

I was so fired up to bring my manuscript to conclusion that I started the editing process. I had been in the midst of the chapter on probability which is the end of the first, philosophical section of the manuscript. Since next up was the brain and neuroscience section, I started ramping up some background work there, taking notes on The Idea of the Brain and The Entangled Brain.

Now that I finished note taking on both of those, I returned to the probability section. It’s got a solid grounding, but I realized that it was short and superficial. So I’ve gone back to sources and am taking notes on the first few chapters of E.T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, which I had been reviewing last fall but without good note taking.

So that puts me way behind sharing my work here in public. Yet slowing down for me is fine as I have not deadline or even any compelling reason to actually finish the manuscript itself. As a tool in the process of exploring these subjects, it’s been valuable. It’s also been a project that has provided some focus on my tools like my Linux computer, the Kindle Scribe and Devonthink.

Over and over again I learn the same lesson that the first step is to define the problem and desired outcomes well. Start with the end in mind and Covey phrased it. Only then is it possible to choose a set of tools for the task, with reassessment of workflow from time to time improving efficiency and keeping the work enjoyable.

Yet projects keep presenting themselves. Since Twitter is pretty dead to me at this point, Reddit has emerged as a random feed to satisfy my endless curiosity. Of course the subject matter is a bit different and I miss Philosophy Twitter and Neuroscience Twitter. There’s lots more computer talk presented to me on Reddit, so I’ve gotten engaged in programming languages, specifically this functional programming paradigm that I learned through doing statistics in R. So I’ve spent a bit of time playing with Scheme variants now and reading some discussions on computation. May take some time away from general reading, but it’s all good when it comes to ensuring one lives in a rich, mentally healthy intellectual environment.