Finding Beauty in the Dissonance

Cognitive Blind Spots and Misinterpreted Life Scripts

*A couple quick editorial notes: I will be doing a short presentation on material related to this post at an upcoming barcamp style gathering organized by Venkat Rao of Ribbonfarm. Last I heard he had only a few spots left so if you are interested in attending and you are in the SF Bay area, check out his announcement and reserve you spot asap. [Update: it looks like the event filled up before I was able to complete this post. If you are particularly enthusiastic about joining, feel free to contact me and I will let you know if Venkat opens up additional spots. ]

Secondly, for new readers who found their way here within the past week – I tend to weave through several related themes at any given time. I will get back to the socioeconomic evolution thread soon enough. In the mean time I hope you will enjoy this as well…

Misinterpreted Life Scripts

Last week I wrote a quick reaction to a post by Cal Newport, in which he implied that diligent focus trumps all other factors in the pursuit of career success, including the innate suitability of the chosen career. Now Cal has written a new post qualifying that position, but again his conclusions are too reductive for my tastes.

by Greg on February 17, 2012

Loss Aversion and The Zombie Clicking Trap

I am the victim of a certain affliction. Most of you probably share it. I call it the zombie clicking trap. From time to time I find myself in front of a screen, not exactly sure why or how I ended up staring blankly at some random webpage. Periodically I will pause for moment and consider my situation…that moment is typically brief. Within a few seconds my eye catches on something and before I realize what has happened I am clicking again. Some minutes later I might pause again and note that the behavior has repeated itself.

At each pause there is some probability I will break the cycle, but these probabilities do not accrue linearly. A 20% chance of breaking the cycle does not imply that by the fifth cycle I am sure to stop. It feels more like a coin flip – each time the probability is the same and sometimes you come up heads ten times in a row.

Last night I nearly fell into the zombie trap. I was ready to go to sleep, all my electronics already shut down, when some vague hint of a thought about twitter popped into my head. Because my defenses were primed I was able to resist the impulse, and I decided instead to rewind my memory and analyse the preceding thought process. This is what I found…

by Greg on January 26, 2012

Exploring and Exploiting

All organisms balance their energy expenditures between exploring and exploiting. Last night I watched a National Geographic documentary about the forest elephants of Gabon so I will use that as an example. These elephants roam hundreds of kilometers from the inland rainforest to the coast. They forage across numerous ecosystems and in some cases even reform the environment to suit their needs. The opening portion of the documentary focused on a clearing that the elephants had created by trampling the vegetation over many generations. The pools in that clearing now collect highly concentrated minerals necessary for the elephants survival and also support plants that can’t be found in the elephants’ “natural” habitat.

In a sense the jungle elephants engage in an instinctual (naturally selected) form of agriculture. But of course, this limited form of environmental engineering is not sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of an animals that can consume hundreds of kilograms of vegetation a day.

by Greg on January 5, 2012

The Dual-Mind Limitation

A bit of housekeeping: I promise to get back to more typical economic/market oriented fare in the upcoming weeks. I am in the process of detailing several revisions to the four quadrant economy model to be followed shortly thereafter by the addition of several new layers to that model. I am also finishing up David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years and have committed to writing a review. That will prove an interesting challenge as Graeber offers an endlessly fruitful reference to draw upon wrapped up in a perspective that is highly divergent from the approach I have taken in my own writing.

Before I get to that I am going to indulge my current fascination with learning and productivity curves one more time. I’ll make some effort to keep us on topic at the end of the post by relating this theme back to the current economic malaise.

by Greg on December 12, 2011

Cultivating Fractal Knowledge Flows

Does strict focus lead to highly productive deliberate practice or disconnection and myopia?

Does engagement lead to productive collaboration or distraction?

…

I faced a curious conundrum recently when someone pointed out that I was equally supporting two apparently contradictory positions. A few weeks ago I wrote a long essay exploring the phenomenology of continuous learning. That was largely a story about developing one’s own internal capabilities. The implied hypothesis was that by focusing deliberately on certain forms of creative discipline, an individual can develop exponentially superior capabilities in the long run.

by Greg on December 1, 2011

Learn From People Like You – Learn By Observing People Unlike You

I have been doing a deep dive on personality types recently. The transition to a free agent career path has imposed a steep learning curve. Lot’s of people will tell you that working independently requires more self discipline. What they won’t tell you is that working independently demands an entirely different sort of self discipline.

The hacks and habits that I had learned previously have not only proved insufficient; in many cases they have proved counter-productive. The habits that lead to success as an employee generally entail suppressing your unique strengths and emphasizing the strengths demanded by your employer. In fact, the ability to (on demand) suppress your areas of divergence and emphasize your areas of convergence is an employment skill in itself. The ability to thoughtfully choose between convergence and divergence is a free agent skill. That may be less true for people who have found particularly fitting professions, but of course the dream-jobbers are not the people adopting free agent life-styles.

by Greg on November 21, 2011

A Pilgrimage Through Stagnation and Acceleration

Why does success so often lead to anti-climax and a sense of stagnation?

Why is creative work so perpetually frustrating ?

Why do you constantly feel like you are falling behind?

In an effort to recover from my recent mini-rut I spent quite a bit of time consuming material that, in retrospect, revolved around these questions. I will try to synthesize several of the more promising items and see if I can’t push them a bit further.

Thrust and Drag

Venkat Rao, attempting to explain the phenomenon of the 10x engineer, proposes a model of creative work based on an analogy to the mechanical concepts of thrust and drag:

He defines thrust work as those tasks with the potential for super-linear performance improvements as a function of consistent extended blocks of deliberate practice:

by Greg on November 2, 2011

I Apologize For Writing This Post…

I apologize for this picture as well. This is how I feel right now...sans the awful mullet wig.

I bet that title got your attention. Next time I should think about attaching such an intriguing to something actually worth reading.

I don’t like this post.

I am starting with that statement. I don’t like that I am writing it. Unfortunately, I committed myself to publishing something tonight – after two weeks of silence – and this is the only thing I can force out of myself at the moment.

I have been struggling with the worst writer’s block for the past two weeks. Actually, the problem isn’t the writing so much as the completing and publishing. I have succeeding in writing and rewriting and then trashing several posts over the past couple weeks. The trouble is with the framing. You, dear reader, don’t just want information. You don’t just want rambling opinions. You don’t just want perspectives. You want all of the above wrapped up in a neat little package that makes the whole thing seem compelling. The neat little package is the difficult part. Or at least that is what keeps repeating in my head, paralyzing my refinement muscles.

by Greg on October 21, 2011