Author: James Vornov

I'm an MD, PhD Neurologist who left a successful academic career on the Faculty of The Johns Hopkins Medical School to develop new treatments in Biotech and Pharma. I became fascinated with how people actually make decisions based on the science of decision theory and emerging understanding of how the brain works to make decisions. My passion now is this deep explanation of what has been the realm of philosophy, psychology and self help but is now understood as brain function. By understanding our brains, I believe we can become happier, more successful people.

Time for Recovery

SF Monochrome

It’s funny how a few days traveling, some dental issues and work can so quickly shift the environment from one of reflection to one of the constant pressure of activity.

As my posting over the last few days shows, I had time to capture images while in San Francisco. My goal was just to get back into visual mode after some months of ignoring the cameras. But the light in the city and the capability of the tools was enough to very quickly get me into that mode of looking that leads to making images. I brought the Leica M10 Monochrom which is a camera with a digital sensor that captures only black and white images since it lacks the color filters needed to reconstruct colors in a digital image. I brought the Monochrom because I wanted to be deliberate in capture, something that the rangfinder focusing M10 brings. And since my final product is monochrome, the B&W camera takes me a step closer from capture to image- The more casual approach compared to the cinematic imagery I’m made in recent years.

So I more or less picked up where I left off, trying to abstract the bits of the city that I can isolate with my lens. I brought my newer 35mm Summicron lens, ending up shooting mostly wide open in that sharp, defining California light. And I definitely enjoyed collecting the images and there’s a pretty high percentage of interesting captures. So I’ve been having fun doing a very quick set of image adjustments and publishing here and Instagram. The 35mm lens opens up the view a bit. While in San Francisco, I stopped in at the SF Leica store to look at the images on display and look over the cameras and lenses. It turned out they had a used electronic viewfinder for the M, the Visoflex, at a good price. So the rest of the trip was variously shot with the EVF, the glass rangefinder or the back screen.

On Sunday, before heading back to the airport for the red-eye flight back to Baltimore, I spent a few hours at SFMOMA, the wonderful San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Not much going on in the way of photography because of new exhibit being hung. So I spent more time looking at paintings this time there. I’ve noted here a number of times that my formative experience with art was with the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Motherwell, Johns, Rothko, Diebenkorn. The headline show at the museum were the paintings of Joan Mitchell. I’d seen them before, but there’s nothing like a retrospective like this to get to know a artist well. Of interest to me was how she wasn’t afraid as an abstract painter to let here images drift back to the landscape enough that the underlying structure of nature starts to emerge from the abstraction. And color. Color is emotional.

Joan Mitchell, La Grande Vallée XVI, Pour Iva, 1983

While viewing the show and since I’ve been thinking about how abstract expressionism informs the images I make. I like the tension between my formal abstraction and the concreteness of the photographic image. I can’t hide the fact that what I’ve photographed a fire plug. But you have to ask why did I capture the image? What did I see in that moment that compelled me to capture an image and publish it here. One of the ideas that I took away from Joan Mitchell’s paintings is that the view wants some challenge. Enough to make viewing a way of participating in the creative act. You see, art presents ambiguous, noisy sensations allowing the viewer to participate in finishing the creation through inference. If there’s no sense of participation with the artist, looking is boring and no fun.

The Coming Knowldege Work Salt Mine

It dawned on me yesterday, just like the developing “Creator Economy” we’re seeing the creation of the “Knowledge Worker Industry”.

A recent episode of Mac Power Users was full of the usual interesting workflow ideas and productivity hacks. But then it got real serious for me real fast.

You see, Sean McCabe for years has been using automation and workflow tools to improve his own productivity. Now he’s using it to gleefully industrialize knowledge work. His current company takes podcasts and videos and hacks them up to nice promo bites for social media. It’s the kind of work that takes some editing skill, editorial ability, and thought. If you can get that down to a process, an assembly line you have knowledge workers sitting in front of a screen doing industrial line work. Get an assignment, process it, send it down the line and get the next job on the line. It sounds so nerdy and innocent: Mac Power Users #613: The Future of Work, with Sean McCabe

David and Stephen talk with Sean McCabe about how he runs his businesses from what can only be described as a Mac battle station while stitching together macOS apps and several cloud services to be more productive.

But I can see how the productivity hack industry can be used to maximize the productivity of knowledge workers. And it brought to mind Cal Newport’s vision of a world without email. Rather than summarizing Cal’s latest book, here’s an interview where he makes the point: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

On Cal’s account, those opportunities are staring us in the face. Modern factories operated by top firms are structured with painstaking care and two centuries of accumulated experience to ensure staff can get the greatest amount possible done.

Our productivity grew 50x in the 20th century. Why? Because, the early 20th century is when we got really serious about process engineering. Like hey, wait a second. If we use an assembly line, we can build cars better. We really started to get serious about building things as a process we could get better and better at. And as he underscored, he’s like, 50x growth is almost inconceivably large.

I’m a highly paid knowledge worker because of my 40 plus year career in science, medicine and drug development. I work in a company that Cal thinks is a “hyperactive hive mind” when what it is a organization of shifting expert teams loosely tied together around the world by a combination of asynchronous (email, document sharing) and synchronous (Teams, Zoom, teleconferences) in which I leverage my knowledge by contributing in dozens of different ways every day.

This is how teams work. I understand that Cal, as an academic, wants to be left alone and leave the operational stuff to a theoretical knowledge industry. But I see that as a digital salt mine. Assembly line knowledge work like Sean’s company. Where creativity and improvisational problem solving go to die.

In the Creator Economy We’re All Creators

Since I appreciate art in many forms, I’ve also been interested in the economics of producing and distributing it. In the last decade, delivery and viewing art in digital form has transformed the landscape.

One of the clearest changes has been the fall of the big distributors and the rise of direct interaction of artists with their audience. The profit has gone out of recording and distribution of music because of streaming services. Movie theaters and big studios now join or cut deals with the many streaming channels that aggregate viewers. Newspapers, publishers, galleries have all similarly collapsed and consolidated, limiting traditional outlets for artists to sell their work for reasonable returns on their time.

Over the summer I read The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Techby William Deresiewicz, a survey across media of how difficult it is for artists to provide for themselves and their families with this loss of intermediaries that often functioned as a supportive ecology for the arts. Publishers and newspapers needed writers and essayists, so enough money went out to ensure a decent pool of talent to create content. At the end of the book, there’s a discussion of how artists are now directly addressing their audiences, but sees the shift of burden from intermediary to artist as a burden for the artist that limits their time and motivation to create.

From my point of view, I treasure some of the artists I follow closely and am more than happy to provide some direct support. I always bring up Craig Mod in this context only because I watched his turn from freelancer to online creative as it happened. For example, Craig invited his supporters into his home to watch him pack for his upcoming walk. You see, Craig’s art is walking, producing books, podcasts, essays and photos along the way.

Starting in about 30 mins: Running a members-only packing and Q&A livestream about my upcoming Ten City Walk.

Folks with money and internet platforms (Instagram, Pinterest, etc) have noticed and we now have a name for direct to consumer art transactions. It’s The Creator Economy. I’ve seen repeated use of this phrase

The creator economy is growing much faster than music streaming – Water & Music

To understand this gap, it’s important to reiterate that music streaming is not part of the “creator economy” by most definitions of the latter term. As I’ve written in the past, some of the core tenets of the creator economy (or “passion economy,” as some investors formerly called it) include defying commodification, enabling direct support from fans or followers and giving creators the ability to charge a price that matches the value they provide, not just the cost of bringing their products to market.

Sounds cliché, I know. But looking back at industry discussions in the last year, it’s been practically impossible to avoid the term “creator” — which could be loosely defined as anyone who creates something online that someone, somewhere, finds valuable and wants to pay for — as the universal signifier of what’s to come, culturally, technologically and financially.

Anecdotally, the FedEx shop near my home has seen a huge increase in creatives at home during the pandemic using them to ship out goods to their patrons.

The Pandemic Has Been Very, Very Good for the Creator Economy – Bloomberg

The business around digital talent has gotten so big that it’s spawned a new phrase, “the creator economy,” that has become one of the business buzzwords of the year. Look no further than the rise of Substack, Patreon, OnlyFans, all of which are giving journalists, podcasters and sex workers the chance to replicate the business models of YouTubers. 

It’s now more clear to me that the extra burden that’s been imposed on artists with the loss of traditional intermediaries won’t be empty for long. A new breed of convenience intermediaries are rapidly rising to fill the gap. It really is like watching an ecology adapt in real time. An external event- digitalization causes the near extinction of some key participants in the ecology. Things move out of balance for a while and other populations may suffer, but the system destabilizes with new or newly adapted organisms that fill the empty niche.

One more thought. Is programming another one of these arts? Have app stores also been one of these extinction events as boxed software died. Maybe we didn’t notice because the app stores and software payment services were part of the disruption that killed typical software distribution of expensive, big products.

Just like so many more of us are photographers and musician because the tools are so good and so easily obtained, I think more of us are leaning programming- at least automation and complex No-Code apps.

Chrys Bader had an interesting take on the rise of software tinkering: HyperCard and what it means for the future of No-Code

My theory here is that the more people become software developers, the more the knowledge permeates culture, and the more the number of hobbyists and tinkerers grows. That means our competence in technology becomes more sophisticated as a society.

Apps get smarter and software development moves toward creating the tools used to create the art. Even if those tools are only tools for thought.

Understanding through teaching

Just processing notes and blog posts has clarified some of my recent interests. In neuroscience, it’s issues of mapping, perceptual decisions and genetic influence on cognition. Then there’s fitness and workflow and some tech news discussion.

One of the functions this casual blogging has is providing a way for me to write in short form about some of the big ideas I have in the ODB manuscript. I spent some time editing the section on chaos, complexity and emergence. The subject is top of mind right now so I’ve been tending to link to related stories on the net. But I’m hoping that my brief descriptions here help to clarify my thinking and help the presentation I’m putting in the manuscript.

I’ve also been dipping into Twitter conversations a bit more often. Since Dave Rogers says it’s the Town Square of the internet. It seems to be a more comfortable place to be over the last few months.

If I can’t describe concepts of ecology and systems here or on twitter in a few lines, I doubt I’ll do much better in the long form manuscript. This clarifying of understanding by teaching goes back to the ancient world. This is often attributed to physicist Richard Feynman but Feynman actually described learning by synthesizing the essentials of subject in a notebook rather than reading a textbook. This is closer to Zettelkasten concept of synthesis than blogging to understanding. Hence, Zettelblogging to capture both the synthesis and the teaching.

Ecologies are stable until they’re not

Systems Theory is central to my approach to understanding decision making, whether looking at mental activity or brain function. Systems Theory shows us how uncertainty arises even in fully deterministic of systems. When cause and effect feedback on each other and small changes result in non-linear effects, the future behavior of a system becomes harder to predict just because linear correlation and simple cause and effect lose explanatory power.

More often than not, I look at complex systems through the filter of ecology. Ecology is the term we use for the study of interacting biological organisms and their habitat in the real world. But by analogy, this mode of thinking becomes useful in thinking about how or brains interact with other brains and the environment. And of course we like to think of technologies, like Apple products and services as being an ecosystem where users, devices and information interact in a system.

Ecologies, like the organisms that live in them, are generally resilient. If they weren’t they wouldn’t last long enough to recognize as ongoing, functioning systems. But that’s not to say that ecologies don’t change over time in response to external inputs or changes in the environment.

A nice example from Ed Yong, who’s writing I treasure. An ecology of whales, krill and the ocean floor. Introduce man and the ecology collapses. The system is hurt but not gone and it may be possible to restart.

To Save the Whales, Feed the Whales – The Atlantic

Just as many large mammals are known to do on land, the whales engineer the same ecosystems upon which they depend. They don’t just eat krill; they also create the conditions that allow krill to thrive.

That’s the key to ecologies. They are constructed and maintained by their participants- all the animals in the environment have to reach a stable balance to persist over time. With change, a new stable state may be reached if the system persists. It may be diminished or barely recognizable, but it changes until it comes to rest in some newest of relationships.

Yong understands ecology and evolution, making his writing rich and deep. By the way, that’s a pointer to the article where it appeared in the Atlantic, behind a paywall. I read his writing in the Apple ecosystem, in Apple News+. As an information source, to enrich my information environment, Apple provides a great service.

As and ecology, I can’t see how these paywalls and Substack subscriptions reach a long term stable state. We used to have newstands where you could dip into a copy of the Atlantic for a small price. You got to read the New Yorker or Readers Digest in the doctor or dentist’s waiting room. Sure, once you have a readership you can move behind a paywall. But once the NYT and Washington Post have aggregated all the readers behind their paywalls they become just another monopoly like Facebook, YouTube and Google.

Not a stable information ecosystem.

By the way, I’m glad I read the Foundation Trilogy before starting the AppleTV series. They are very different works, related stories.

The Apple series is way more coherent and focused. They’ve collapsed lots of Asimov’s threads into a real fabric, but along the way has become so much more conventional modern SciFi than Azimov’s experimental imaginings that made less sense but were wilder with huge story gaps.

The Apple show introduces some of the fantasy elements that Asimov added only in the second book and amplified in the third. Just so you know, I can enjoy stories with mind reading and mind uploading, but I find it much more likely that antigravity and faster than light travel are possible than the possibility that neuronal networks can ever be instantiated in computers or that their activity can be read out externally. But all fiction requires suspension of disbelief.

We’re already in an augmented reality

My cycling and fitness activities are being enabled by a set of technologies that were not widely available a few years ago- online coaching through internet enabled analysis of power files and streaming fitness sessions monitored by a wearable measuring movement and heart rate.

20 years ago we started using heart rate monitors widely. Before that there was just subjective effort. With a few chips we could see inside ourselves and augment the experience by seeing another, physiological dimension. Now my bike has a power meter, so I can see my actual output and compare it to the physiological effect and the subjective effort. My experience of riding and ability to train is augmented. The winner of Tour de France last year was only 23. The cycling pros of the previous generations ascribe the rise of younger champions to their use of these technologies to skip the years of learning and slow builds that the previous generation had to go through.

The key is that you need to use the technology to achieve real personal goals, not just enrich tech platforms.

One concern is that a machine would not need to be more intelligent than humans in all things to pose a serious risk. “It’s something that’s unfolding now,” he said. “If you look at social media and the algorithms that choose what people read and watch, they have a huge amount of control over our cognitive input.”

Do you want to blindly give away your data to others and allow their algorithms manipulate us? Or seek real experiences augmented by technology? Do we live in the real, augmented world or in their “metaverse”

I’m hoping that Apple’s augmented or virtual reality device will be more along the lines of a way to enhance the experience of real or imagined worlds and not a way to enslave us in their artificial environment.

The Augmented Environment

One of my conclusions from studying how the brain interprets the world and how people actually make decisions is that the single most important decision we make is the choice of our environment. And by that I mean both physical and semantic environment. Who are the people we surround ourselves with? What are the books and websites we read? The key is that our beliefs strongly condition how the world occurs to us. We can’t decide in the moment how to react to the statement of a politician or writer.

In statistics, we call these beliefs “priors” that determine the probabilities we assign to events. We update those priors with new information all of the time, so the information we’re exposed to on an ongoing basis determine perception.

At the brain level, we can see this in the most basic forms of perception, like how we see ambiguous figures, for example here: Long-term priors influence visual perception through recruitment of long-range feedback

A computational model incorporating hierarchical-predictive-coding and attractor-network elements reproduced both behavioral and neural findings. In this model, a bias at the top level propagates down the hierarchy, and a prediction error signal propagates up.

It’s reasonable to extend this kind of biased perception extending to how we perceive what people say to us or their motives. If you believe you live in a violent environment or that some classes of people are inherently violent, your priors will influence your interpretation of the words and actions of everyone around you. No choice in the matter, because belief comes from experience and experience largely comes from environment.

The trouble is that in our augmented reality, we don’t experience much of the world at all. We read reports of the world and interpretations of events. That’s an overlay that we experience as part and parcel of the real world, even though it’s just an overlay providing an interpretation, augmenting the pure sensory event.

So choose your friends and your information sources carefully.

Casual Blogging and Hypertext

One of the advantages of adopting casual blogging is that the blank paper fear is banished. I put the date or a topic at the top and simply write what comes to mind. It should be easy to write. Publishing should be frictionless. But hopefully that casual journaling is the first part of a bigger process.

#Why blog?

In a note about the Tinderbox Meetup he participated in, Dave Rogers on Nice Marmot discusses why he blogs

I don’t do this for an audience. I do it for myself. I have no idea how many people visit here. I looked at the logs once, can’t make head or tail of them. Can’t deny that it’s a pleasure whenever I learn that someone reads what I post here, but I don’t chase it.

I’m also writing primarily for my benefit and grateful to those like Dave who have been steady readers over the years. Do we write ourselves into existence on the internet?

The narrative voice is the point of view, the way in which the reader will hear and experience the story. The first-person point of view invites the reader to see the story through the author’s perspective. The narrative voice is a reflection of the writer’s personality, a reflection of who they are. The writer displays their voice in the way they tell their story, the words they use, the aspects they highlight, the feelings they describe. Through the writer’s voice, readers can experience an event in a unique way.

Imagining an audience provides meaning to the public act of writing. Even if no one reads, there’s an implied listener. There’s a sense of creating something bigger than the grind of day to day life in art.

For years Michelle Silver, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, studied doctors as they shifted from being on call to doing secondary work to eventually retiring. And she found that, at the end, they essentially fell off a cliff. One day they were respected and passionate, with a clear purpose. Then they were just normal people.

Tinderbox is a hypertext tool

In his post, Dave makes some points about how these meetups and videos may not be doing Tinderbox any favors. I tried to watch the first one on blogging and as Dave pointed out it was filled with editing HTML and long complex coding that was not at all useful to me. Some of Michael Becker’s first YouTube videos were somewhat introductory gave me some nice ideas about setting up and using Tinderbox. For the vast majority of users looking at the new crop of personal knowledge management apps like Obsidian, Craft and Notion, I think it makes Tinderbox look too intimidating and complex.

Michael looks at Tinderbox as a programming environment, I fear, not as a hypertext tool for notes. Mark Bernstein has written about the philosophy behind the tool over the years.

Mark has always emphasized “incremental formalization”, which means starting with the notes and letting the objects dictate the organization as you go along. Obviously a set of notes referencing academic literature is going to need some way of referencing those publications, but there are many ways to accomplish that and the approach could differ for different projects. This is from The Tinderbox Way:

Tinderbox is designed to help you write things down, find them, think about them, and share them. Tinderbox is an assistant. Its meant to help, to facilitate. Its not a methodology or a code. Its a way to write things down, link them up, and share them. Its a chisel, guided by your hand and your intelligence.

The other key feature of Tinderbox is that it’s built on a hypertext foundation, supporting multiple views into the notes. Not only are there note to note links, but text to text and note to text links. You can look at a set of notes as an outline or as a map.

As we’ve all recognized over the years, Tinderbox’s greatest weakness is that flexibility. The competing tools have clear affordances that show you how it is to be used. But the truth is that it really only takes a few hours of use to start down the road of note taking and incrementally building a structure to support workflow.

Right now, I’m in the process building a Zettelblogging Tinderbox. My use is different from anything I’ve done before because of the wide variety of topics I’ve been writing about here at ODB. The other difference is that I’m putting Tinderbox in the center of a processing flow where text flows from Drafts into DEVONthink and on to Tinderbox for summarizing. I’m surprised that I’m then moving my notes out of Tinderbox into Ulysses to become text again. It’s a chain, but each program is supporting a unique activity.

It’s important to summarize and synthesize. Otherwise you fall into the well known Collector’s Fallacy

But knowledge-building doesn’t work that way. And saving content into some archive doesn’t either. I’m guilty of this myself. Having used Evernote for a decade I was used to saving everything I wanted to remember into the tool. I sorted and curated, tagged, and sometimes even highlighted content. But I fell victim to the Collectors Fallacy. Because you collected something doesn’t mean you learned it or are able to explain it.

This is where the hypertext environment of Tinderbox excels for me.