Bifurcating stresses

I've always struggled with decisions. I used to think I had bad judgment. Actually, I did have bad judgment, but, by some luck, it was not the worst judgment. I've always tended to think things through, or at least try hard to.

When you are depressed enough, your deciding gets tangled up and impaired. I remember going to a shoe store and my best friend treating me as if I were handicapped with indecision. The atmosphere made me feel as if I needed a decision about footwear made for me. The clerk kept looking at me strangely. That woke me up, a bit.

Much later, another friend told me about a similar conversation with a therapist who'd replied "I love making decisions!" She'd fizzed on passionately about decisions. They make her feel energetic and free, a complete human being. She looks forward to them. This inspired me. If someone I've never met can feel joyous making decisions, well so can I, I imagined. It used to be difficult for her. Now she loves it.

That's sort of how I see it.

Overthinking is a danger, but it's also overrated as a danger and an error. When you think something through obsessively, you get better at thinking about it.

When I was just about my most depressed, I remember I'd get out of class or off of work and I'd have some time to find food. Many times I'd drive around, abrading internally while trying to decide what wouldn't mess up my head. Lots of foods would give me migraines at the time, or at least clutter my thinking somehow. I remember sitting in a parking lot for an hour after more than an hour of driving, convinced I needed to make a decision and get out of the car, but feeling unable to choose, broken. It was a routine experience, but that time was especially bad. I wasn't calm on the inside, either. I was spewing sparks. I was catching fire on oil slicks. I couldn't get myself to do even simple things.

So I used to believe I was irreparably impaired, because I thought so hard about things and couldn't make up my mind, and when I did, it didn't work out well.

What I learned, though, is that this is especially deep practice.

After enough experiences like this, you become wise.

First you start making good decisions. Initially they're just as difficult, but suddenly, on one fine cherry blossom morning, they're not disappointments, and then the process gets easier. Your judgment is no longer bad.

Second, you start making better decisions than other people. Your judgment is somehow unexpectedly good.

Third, you find that you can relay what you've picked up to other people. You can talk about what's complicated and what's simple. You can feel the decision landscape someone's walking on, and they'll appreciate your descriptions of what they haven't said. Your judgment is shared.

Having the guts to admit you don't understand something simple, or to admit that your judgment is poor, allows you to see deeper patterns.

What I've learned, then, is that overthinking is a cost up front that pays off later.

That's what I tell my students, too, if it comes up. Many of them want to dismiss their mistakes as "overthinking." But I understand this better. When you don't know a domain or problem type or situation well, your brain goes into overdrive picking up on what's there, on leads, on angles, on potentials, on regularities and irregularities. After a while, you can navigate all this almost unconsciously, maybe even literally asleep, anyway on autopilot. Autopilot takes much less mental activity because the brain has reorganized itself. But if you try to short-circuit that process, if you say as a beginner "I'm just overthinking it," then I really don't think you're doing yourself a service. Your goal should not be to limit how much time and energy your brain spends reorganizing itself.

For better and worse, I've always wanted to be a game designer. Games are about decisions. There's a kind of poetry in the struggle just deciding. I get to see it all in slow motion. It becomes a talent rather than a defect.

Anyway, that's one way of looking at it.

I've told people I'm almost all about this one idea, about choice. Games are the art made of choice, choice distilled, rather than an art distilled from many choices. That essence mixes with the above and is why I keep saying it. I want to understand what choice is at the deepest possible level, and I want to unfold the best of those growing roots.

A fundamental teaching

There's a fundamental tension in teaching one-on-one that applies whether someone's trying to solve a math problem or write a paper. They will get stuck or be unsure or wrong or ineffective, and they'll need your help. How do you respond? Do you show them how it's done and hope some of the spaghetti sticks, to brandish one extreme of the map, or do you ask them lots of questions and try like Socrates to guide them to an inner wisdom they'd always concealed from themselves?

Given enough time, my preference is the latter. About 2,500 years ago, a few years before Socrates developed his famous method of investigating and teaching, and thousands of miles away, Confucius wrote, "Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three." He also wrote that he would refuse to work with a student who wouldn't work hard to bring in the other corners, which by today's standards is going a bit far.

With math especially, I've noticed that many tutors and teachers lean in the other direction, possibly using the justification that "worked examples" are well known to be very effective, at least for what are called "well-defined problems" like math questions with correct answers. This becomes untrue as you go further into math and the questions get open-ended, but it holds in most math classes.

Most students prefer to have someone just tell them the damn answer.

That's not my style, though. Oh, I'll tell students all kinds of answers. I love to beat their calculators at arithmetic. Sometimes I write out the algebra. Often I give very-mini-lectures. There is no one correct approach to teaching. But I believe in their intelligence, and I push it to grow. Sometimes this frustrates them. Often they think I'm stupid or incompetent. Often they're right about that. But there's a method to my stupidity and incompetence.

If you want to solve a difficult problem, you will need tolerance for the feeling that you're working on a difficult problem and not really prepared to and not really good at this.

That's the number one thing you need, actually.

That's what I try to show students how to handle. Questions come up that I don't know how to answer. Mostly I do know. Experience has taught me. But I resist taking my "authority," such as it is, either from innate intelligence or from having memorized a solution. My "authority" comes from a greater comfort with uncertainty and embarrassment and confusion and inadequacy than my students have. That lets me help them get things right when they need to be right, or original when they need to be original.

Sometimes I won't be able to figure out how to answer something, and I'll tell a student, "Ask your teacher." People respond very differently to this. Many are very accepting and are even encouraged that I'm human. They might give an indication that they feel embarrassed for me (I still do get embarrassed) but let it go. It's often the very smart ones who find this unacceptable. They'll go and complain that I had to look things up. They'll say they feel uneasy and uncertain about everything else when I don't know my stuff. That's understandable. It's a feeling that's familiar to all of us, and part of my job is to avoid that. At the same time, the key insight to learn from Wikipedia's success is not that it's unreliable because everyone can edit it. Instead, we should notice that Wikipedia is shockingly reliable given how it works, and we should take away the idea that every source, including the scientific papers, our textbooks, our professors and parents and friends, experts on television and at conferences and in labs, all of these have a level of unreliability we should not actually ignore. Most students who complain because they want me to know everything work with me again. I don't know everything; I'm not always the best source, but I'm often a good one.

Not just young adults, but many people haven't crossed a certain river yet.

Your intelligence isn't what you know.

The best teachers don't always tell you the answer.

The best teachers may not know the answer.

The most valuable work anywhere is in this tension between questions and answers, between answers and actions, and sometimes most importantly, the tension between uncertainty and the first brave question.

Does that sound a little dry? All the world's wrapped up in it. Give it a spritz and put it in the microwave.

Objectivity out of formula

I've been thinking more than usual about objectivity. Friends often take a postmodern stance and come back with, "What is objectivity, anyway? I don't think it exists." My view is quite different. If I were a philosopher, I unsheepishly wouldn't be a postmodern one! For practical purposes, I'm defining objectivity like this:

logic x evidence x uncertainty x openness

In other words, objectivity is curiosity at a high skill level.

Uncertainty is critical to your logic. If you aren't a smidge nervous about making mistakes, then you're making mistakes in logic—trust me! But before you do something rash like that, why would you trust me? Well, for years I've tutored math and other logical things (next to more subjective things like writing). And since middle school, I've coded in a variety of computer languages: basically, logic with ornamentation and gears attached. If the logic doesn't hang together at escape velocity, the code run's mangled. And if the student doesn't cotton on soon, the student's answers will go sideways and fall off the table and get eaten by feral cats. I've had countless chances to watch this phenomenon closely and tinker with it.

Logic is extremely unforgiving of little mistakes and oversights, and this is why most everyone you know still underestimates and underuses it. Emotionally and interpersonally, it's easier and more sophomorically delicious to accuse logic of being too flakily mechanized than it is to openly accuse a user of logic, or, sensibly, their listener, of whiffing. Little mistakes and oversights lead to big consequences. This is why we go paddling over the horizon to the oracle of uncertainty for advice on sculpting logic that works. We undismantle good logic. Ask your favorite coder this: "Do you avoid bugs by feeling so certain they aren't there?" I suspect the answer will be something like this:
"Negative, but if we feel certain they are there, we are not initially certain where."

Even when the logic side of reasoning is well cared for and polished and languidly rings true, a blind and deaf and generally unsensing logician will be, or will soon become, wrong about nearly everything. Logic needs raw material, malachite, facts. Openness helps you find and admit new evidence, not least by communicating what you have and agreeing to barter. Uncertainty can be fearful, but openness wants the new, the strange, the unexpected, even the unsettling. These two words overlap, but neither is enough alone.

"Logic + evidence + curiosity" would surely get the same point across, wouldn't it? But I like the more detailed equation, objectivity = skilled curiosity = evidence x openness x logic x uncertainty. (Rearranged... order doesn't matter under multiplication, yo.)

If even one of those factors isn't present, neither is objectivity. Zero times anything is zero! Maybe I wrote logic first before because it's "infallible," whereas evidence may be false or cherry-picked to support a belief or grind an axe. Beginning with a logical mindset might help, I suppose; but really, this ordering and reordering is just an excuse for discussion. The order matters zilcho! Admittedly, this is far from the kind of equation that would unfurl/exfoliate an ecosystem on a newly discovered planet, or even one you are very likely to plug numbers into, but I think it captures some of the elements and dynamics.

Openness and uncertainty could be represented as any number between 0 and 1, so that they work as dials or volume knobs on evidence and logic, respectively.

Plot hole: Sometimes you will luck out with a wild guess. If you could plug numbers into the equation, it would opine that you aren't objective. Let's say you use neither logic nor evidence when you make your bid: zeroes on both of those. Logic=0. Evidence=0. Whether you're passionately sure about your precognitive gift or just floating an idea, you can't be objective yet. Let's wait and see. Actually, let's go behind the scenes and ask the future. Ok, so, hm, your penciled description—"In exactly one month to the second there will be a swarm of grasshoppers and an electrician here"—is accurate, but you don't know that, do you? Your method isn't objective... or not yet. Guess-and-check, otherwise known as trial-and-error, is a legit method, puts makeup on the enormous talons of the uncanny beak of evolution. So you check. You do what it takes to gather facts. Once all that is done, once you've openly checked and now see the evidence, you can know—admitting uncertainly that you might be dreaming or crazy—logically that seeing grasshoppers swarming an electrician at the preordained time and location means they are very likely present, and therefore the original prediction holds up in spite of seeming unsubstantiated at the time. And the equation suddenly won't be producing a zero, either. By doing this work, you've removed the lack of objectivity. Though the equation doesn't show it, accuracy is a fact—which may or may not be determinable in a given time and place—while objectivity is a process. You can sometimes get an accurate answer randomly, say by listening to a crazy horse vet on a topic neither you nor they know anything about. An objective process might confirm the accuracy of the wild guess. You also may well, and more than just sometimes, follow an objective method and draw an inaccurate conclusion. But if you keep following the objective method, the boat should uncapsize eventually, as soon as better evidence or logic becomes available. Uncapsizing quickly is a political virtue of objectivity. It creates a more adaptive society. Random insights do not harm objectivity, though they won't be objective initially. A reluctance to uncapsize harms objectivity.

Other bigger plot hole: Emotions and opinions. Whatever your emotion or opinion is, isn't that objectively your emotion or opinion? Honestly, I don't know what the equation would say. Putting aside the equation and falling back on that last idea of objectivity as a process, I suppose there is a process toward knowing yourself. Objectively, you could know clearly—or not know clearly—how you feel. Polite questions aside, though, no one can or should argue with you about what your emotion or opinion or preference is. (Example questions that, while resembling a cross-examination, can be delivered politely: Is your "favorite color" really always your favorite, or is that an answer you've chosen to make a standard answer for yourself? Are you turning it into your favorite, rather than one of many colors you enjoy differently in different places, by calling it your favorite? Personally, I have several answers to "favorite color" and feel I'm creating the favorite status by saying one, which I enjoy for the fact I'm choosing in that moment.) People who try to do this impolitely, try to control people's preferences and feelings and views, seem not to understand subjectivity. Subjectivity is objectively there, but it doesn't need to match anything external, necessarily. A good answer when someone is pressing, in my experience, is "I believe that that's what you believe" or similarly "This is my feeling and preference and I have every right to those, don't I?" Not only do you have a right—they are fully yours and no one else's and do not necessarily respond to reason and evidence at all. Their objectivity is in their existence, not in their harmony with something external. Their subjectivity is in their internality and full ownership by the person sharing them, who could fluctuate or choose differently at any time but must not be beleaguered into doing so, because the choice is one of self and of expression.

Objectivity is often seen as the enemy of subjectivity and emotions and such. But aside from factual discussion (sometimes the focus really should be on facts and logic, more than how people feel about them, which can become irrelevant to a highlighted point and misleading as well) true and full objectivity, as I see it anyway, is radically accepting and can even be radically welcoming to all subjectivity as, well, really truly there.

I dislike the pretentiousness of neck ties. I have a few patterns that put a sparkle in my eye, but you can't clean them, and if you aren't ultra-careful with them, they crinkle. They seem to be built with falling apart quickly in mind. Wear one a few times and the label starts decomposing visibly from the underside, protruding from your careful neck-hanging arrangement. Solitary threads holding ends and seams together come out like roaches on a warm night. I've never seen such an excuse for charging undeserved money. Given that you can't wash them, they should be indestructible: I have similar trousers that I've been washing, drying, and sporting carelessly since 1999. Finally, oh finally: you wrap one around your neck in a slipknot, as if in a totem to your employer's power of life and death over you. This is supposed to make people take you seriously as superior to the average human. The tomfoolery of the act of tie-hanging has never rested on shaky ground, even when I have found my ego buoyed by it, even when I have gone sunning in the glow of the "discipline" of presentation, displaying cooperativeness with the effort of maintaining all this. Just because the ruse of status works on other humans, and quite consistently, and even works sometimes to fool ourselves, we can't conclude that it's non-ludicrous. I'd happily burn all my ties and wear a tail to work instead.

When my brother and I did Tae Kwon Do, we wore colorful belts. Tying one on made you feel calm and proud because you'd won it in pain and performance. When the color was black, the instructor taught you a new way to tie your belt that was more elaborate and looked better, more symmetrical. The knot seemed to enfold meaning and flowed with the uniforms, flags, bows, calls-and-responses, moments of meditation, and warm-ups of putting on a role. You wore your belt for a reason that had applied in every lesson. You led more of the exercises. When belts wore in, they'd show sand-colored underlying fabric in a way that felt elegant, even a little intimidating. You knew because you had been intimidated yourselves, then flat out-sparred. They could be washed occasionally if carefully and otherwise accumulated sweat. They were sewn, it seemed, even stronger than your exertions.

Good aboutnoon, a dream!

Often I'll doze off earlier in the night but wake up and be awake until about dawn. It's important - to me - to be able to sleep until I wake up, when I'm depleted - say until noon - today by rare occasion it was 12:30. Others might consider that a luxury, but when you have unusual circadian rhythms it's just caring about yourself, treating your health with respect, and standing up for both.

I had an amazing dream before I woke up with several ideas I want to use. I miss rollerblading... That was one of them. Two or three others were creative ideas.

I like the idea of picking little ideas and being really persistent with them until others follow along. The idea might be as simple as a thing to do with friends.

Before I went to sleep I traced a note in the cloud about wanting something I'm excited to code, to help me past a block on something I need to code. The dream gave me an idea I'm excited to code. In the dream I was also thinking about crunch time - the way coders are abused with unreasonable time demands on many projects. I imagined being part of a better way.