Westworld explores how others might have a better understanding of you than yourself. The chance, if we aren’t paying attention, that other people can see what we can’t see if they are detached and observant. In “Sapiens” & “Homo Deus”, Yuval Harari questions how willing we will be to work with artificial intelligence and things that watch us. Virginia Postreltalks about tacit knowledge in “The Future and Its Enemies”. Stuff we understand without knowing we understand. The driving force behind Adam Smith’s invisible hand. You don't need central decision-makers making complex decisions. You want to drive choice down to where the knowledge lies. We don't necessarily understand ourselves, but we are still the best place to make our decisions. Attention doesn’t scale. Someone understanding us better than we understand ourselves relies on deep listening and care. Local markets with ultra-local decision-making empowers people to make decisions. Information feeds up through the paths that people choose. Through the impact of their actions. Rippling consequences of meaning creation. It doesn't matter if we don't understand this in watered-down averages and stereotypes. It does matter to the intimate relationships that wrestle with understanding.
Money and words are a form of communication. A way to hear
stories. You can reflect on and learn through other people’s stories. Your
reflection will change as you change. Part of my story is Apartheid in South
Africa. I cannot let go of History. I refuse to let go of History. Because it
is such an important part of understanding. We carry all this knowledge with
us. Some written, some aural, some in the way we dance, the way we make our
art, the way we build community. Part of being human is this beautiful, deep,
painful, glorious, connection to everything. The future, the past, and other
people’s now. That source of understanding gives us a powerful view of the why
of why we make our decisions. I believe that life does not have meaning. We
give it meaning. We create meaning. Books like Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search
for Meaning” and David Duncan’s “The River Why”. See what your values are. See
what is important to you. Then create a bolder life.
Bryan Caplan has
teamed up with cartoonist Zach Weinersmith to produce a fantastic book called “Open
Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration”. I am a migrant myself, and am
a dual citizen of South Africa and the United Kingdom. I was 14 when Apartheid “within”
South Africa ended, and so have to agree with Caplan’s perspective that the
Four Freedoms of Labour, Goods, Services and Capital without the right to live
and work where we want is Global Apartheid. The attempt at introducing “Dompas”
(Dumb passports) to keep people in their homelands provided fuel for the fires
of brave freedom fighters like Gandhi and Mandela. With a chapter entitled “Trillion-Dollar
Bills on the Sidewalk”, the case isn’t purely altruistic. Caplan takes the
reasoning behind opponents’ arguments seriously and builds pragmatic solutions
to various concerns. Particularly interesting in a microambitious way, are the
Keyhole Solutions, which directly address issues. Nudging forward together.
In her book “Sweat your Prayers”, Gabrielle Roth tells the story
of an Indian cab driver who was asked how he survived the chaos of big City traffic.
“I move into the space”. More Time and Space often feels like the one thing that
is unobtainable, and yet we all have the same amount. Part of it is the big wet
blanket of Success. Proving ourselves. Fighting for recognition. For justification.
For excuses. For worth. The Mental Health work I am doing at the moment is
outside of that world. I spend time running, twisting my Rubik’s cube, twirling
on the Dance Floor, learning languages, and doing Tony Buzan style “Memory Work”
(using the senses to create a filing system to help pay more attention). None
of this seems “productive”. Gabrielle Roth points out that it takes a lot of
discipline to be a free spirit. The space is there. But you do need to do the
work to build a practice that lets you see it.
In “Being Wrong”, Kathryn Schulz makes the point that we don’t know what it feels like to be wrong. Once we gain the information that makes us genuinely realise we were wrong, we are instantly in a different state. Resilience requires allowing for our perpetual ignorance. Daniel Kahneman highlights the challenge we face because of our desire to seek out patterns, “the idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” We think that once we have information, we could have done better if we rewound, and play was pressed again. The world is random. Just pressing play again would change the result. Like throwing a dice again armed with a time machine, knowing a dice was a four last time still wouldn’t be helpful. Each mistake arms us to avoid that mistake in the future, only if the future plays out in exactly the same way. According to a fixed script. What Kahneman highlights is that the correct lesson when you make a mistake because you didn’t anticipate something is that “the world is difficult to anticipate”. You will be wrong. You will make mistakes. Resilience is about building the capacity to survive and thrive despite the certainty of uncertainty.
We are all at the centre of our own Universes. What we see and understand is determined by what we have seen and understood. A Controlled Hallucination which plugs in new information to all the things we have processed before. In Mindwise by Nicholas Epley, he talks about reasons why it can boggle our minds when people don't understand things the same way we do.
The Neck Problem is that people are simply paying attention to different things to us. Our attention is limited, and other people don't dwell on the same things we do. The most important thing to us, isn't necessarily the most important thing to them. There are too many important issues in the world for us to focus on. We choose. We choose differently.
The Lense Problem is that we don't see things in the same way. The Curse of Knowledge is that the deeper you understand something, the more it restricts you from seeing something else. Once you can read, you can't help but 'hear' words in your head if you see them. They then frame everything else. If you can't read a certain alphabet or language, you just see squiggles... and you will see differently. The same with languages. The same with all the context, and shared context, required to understand. Nothing exists in isolation.
My mind and heart are regularly boggled. I think all of us have to struggle with miscommunication, misunderstanding and generally missing each other. That is why I increasingly believe that debate is overrated. When someone disagrees, we should be fascinated. We should explore that alternative way of thinking. In exploring with them, both of our ways of seeing will be changed.
That is what connection does. It changes us by changing how we experience the world. Together.
I spend a lot of time in my head. If you are like me, it is noisy there. More a committee than a voice that makes sense a lot of the time. Often quite harsh. I started Yoga about 9 years ago. The point, I was told, was to still the waves of the mind. Basically, to ask the committee to take a tea break every now and then. I like tea breaks. This sounded like something for me.
I came across the metaphor of the Elephant and the Rider in one of my favourite books of all time. Jonathan Haidt's 'The Happiness Hypothesis' is a wander through the history and current thinking around well being. Other books like 'Thinking Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman, 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell, 'Focus' by Daniel Goleman, and 'The Art of Learning' by Josh Waitzkin all touch on a similar idea.
We tend to identify with our Rider. The Rider tells the story of our lives and explains our behaviour. The truth is that it is really the Elephant that does the doing. The Elephant may go right or left at the command of the Rider most of the time, giving the illusion that the Rider is in control. The Elephant just wants to do the same thing on those occasions. The Rider has no ability to make the Elephant do something it doesn't want to do.
The Rider can, with patience, train the Elephant. The Elephant is in fact far more powerful and intelligent than the Rider. The Rider is slow, deliberate, and forgetful. The Elephant embeds knowledge. To change what the Elephant knows and does takes time, patience, and attention. Rather than justifying or excusing your Elephant, the first task is to observe it. To understand it. To not take the credit, or the blame, for everything it does. Realising that your Elephant actually understands a lot you don't. Then you can tweak and teach, with humility.
Step one is realizing you are not the committee in your head. Give them a tea break.
Published in 1959, 'Things Fall Apart' was way ahead of its time. It is a poetic and layered telling of both the strengths and weaknesses of traditional cultures without being binary. Conservative cultures build up wisdom for dealing with the waves of life. Rituals, relationships, and religions that try give some sense to the challenges we face. Historically, we haven't been good at opening our eyes and ears to the depth behind our beliefs. We have hurt each other. We have hurt ourselves. The great thing about being human is we can learn from the stories others have lived. They may not mirror ours, but the rhythms that drive us share an underlying beat. Improving the quality of our self-reflection.
Brett, you and I both come from incredibly similar backgrounds. We are also both extroverts and very keen to have a positive impact on the world. Then come the demons to wrestle. Poems like 'White Man's Burden' by the author of the Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling. Cringe. The History of the 'Civilising Missions' of Colonialism as a modern version of the failed Crusades. I look around the world and see deep structural challenges and pain. In my core, I feel compelled to do something about. Yet something shouts back. White, English-speaking, Men like you and I have a lot to answer for. Is it our place to be at the front of discussions?
Great question, Trevor and i think this is one of those very thin lines we need to tread carefully. White people doing nothing is problematic for sure. White people trying to do everything or feeling like they need to swoop in and save the day [white saviour complex is a term for a reason] is seriously unhelpful too. So what's a white middle-aged guy to do? i think, at the very least, that our role is to do the work that needs to be done with white middle-aged men. Call our own to action and to change and where necessary help explain concepts like white privilege and being an ally and sharing some of the lessons we have hopefully been learning as we have started to change. It is a sad reality that many white men will only listen to white men and so another place where we possibly have positive influence is to be able to draw that crowd and then hand over the mic to a black/coloured/indian person. How best do we leverage the white male privilege and influence we have without it being a power move is something to wrestle with i believe?
(3/10) Trev:
I am busy reading a book called 'Factfulness' by Han Rosling. It is a really powerful reminder of how much the world has changed in our lifetimes. It talks about the Drama Instinct, and our need to divide things into categories (Rich/Poor, Developing/Developed, Racist/Not Racist, Us/Them) and create a gap. I worry that in our atonement, we end up focussing on and highlighting real, but increasingly extreme, problems. We feed them. We (cough) elect them. Partnered with that, I am reading 'Trying not to Try' by Edward Slingerland on the Chinese idea of Wu Wei - action through inaction. I have always been what we called at Westville Boys' High a 'Try Hard'. Sometimes I think we end up falling over ourselves in our desperation to be agents of change. To hold that mic in the first place to be able to hand over.
(4/10) Brett:
i think in South Africa we have had too long a time of white people on the whole not contributing much to the betterment of our country. i don't think it takes any action or effort to locate the privilege we have or the mic - i think what is key is what we do with what we have. i also believe that most significant change will come through relationships and if we all just focused on developing deeper authentic relationships with people who didn't look like us then the majority of that other stuff will naturally be taken care of from the foundation or platform of friendship and family. i think i disagree with you on the not-trying part - i don't think white people in South Africa right now need to be given more license to not do stuff. (5/10) Trev:
Yes, the stuff I am reading about certainly doesn't sit well with how we were brought up. We are wired on action and rolling your sleeves up. On 'doing stuff'. It is interesting watching the miracle happening around the world, but particularly in China and India, over the last 30 years. As people are empowered through the removal of obstacles. The type of action I am suggesting isn't doing nothing. It is more opening our eyes and curiosity to the things that are going well, and feeding them. Often 'giving back' from a Privileged position feels hierarchical and condescending. I will include the cartoon you shared, which you then asked for a discussion around, which led to this exchange. I 100% agree it starts with developing more relationships. Most relationships I have seen that thrive have a degree of peer-to-peer respect and (wink, wink) Common Change. The irony implicit in Wu Wei is that 'not trying' opens up spontaneity and more effective action, because of the natural flow of things. Instead of fighting.
(6/10) Brett:
i completely agree that developing more relationships is the way to go and if the focus is on that then you can probably eliminate a lot of the trying. The white people i think of when i talk about those who have not made effort have particularly not made it in the area of relationships and so they tend to live in largely white bubbles and black/coloured/indian people tend to be the people who serve them [be it homes or petrol or groceries] which is problematic if that is the only narrative because then you don't have to teach your children how to be prejudiced at all because the lesson is being modelled day in and day out. i do still think because of the extent of the inequality in South Africa that action has to be a part of moving forwards even beyond relationships [or around the foundation of relationships]. It is not enough to say let's be better from now when the difference it still so glaringly stark. How does your thinking relate to this aspect of life? (7/10) Trev:
I just think we end up focusing on the dramatic and missing the miraculous shift of the normal. So the Purple Cow gets the attention. The type of situation you describe was absolutely normal growing up. I had no people who weren't Germanic in my class until I was 12. I was lucky to have parents who taught me about what was going on, and to live in a relatively liberal place. Even then, Westville was by no means an exception to the Apartheid Bubble in terms of prejudice. Westville today has come on in leaps and bounds. It is not the same place. The 'gap' between Black and White has disappeared, and there are now heaps and heaps of positive examples of the kinds of conversations that need having. There is still a gap between the averages, but not a hole without real people. Just think of the variety of views in our Social Media conversations. I am not saying the example you highlight is okay. It isn't. I am not asking you to change what you are doing (I got in trouble after our last conversation on anger). I still do a lot of fighting and focusing on the things that aren't right. I just think perhaps we need to be pausing, celebrating, and remembering just what a miracle we have born witness to over the course of our lives.
We focus on the Remarkable, not the average
(8/10) Brett
Well, that is where i would strongly suggest we inject the Both/And over the Either/Or which if i have learned anything over the last four years - and hopefully i have - is the biggest of them all. We tend towards extremes or to putting up boundaries or insisting on labels and so much of that stuff is problematic. Yes, in many cases the gap between black and white has disappeared but also in many cases it hasn't [maybe particularly in Cape Town where we have a bad rep for that sort of thing and well earned] and so we need to celebrate the victories and continue to shout the stories of those doing incredible things [people, communities, organisations] and this i feel could use way more airplay. But at the same time, we need to continue to hold the light in front of those who haven't seen it yet and continue to call them to the table. Have we strayed a little bit from our starting point which seemed to be an acknowledgment that there is work to be done, but when it needs to be done, where is our place as white people in that? What is the Both/And to that question i wonder? (9/10) Trev I think we can BOTH recognise that there is work to be done AND celebrate the progress that has been made. We can BOTH have a positive impact AND not fall to our 'gap instinct' of having to create an us and them to understand things. As the walls of Apartheid have fallen, perhaps our eyes need updating from 1994 to 2018. Much like the Africa of the 'Do they know it's Christmas time at all' from 1984 needs updating in the minds of those in the United Kingdom. I don't think we need to be panicking and shouting to make real change. That can be true at the same time as not believing that the extremes are justified. To return to the start... I think the lessons of 'Civilising Missions' of the past and unintended consequences mean we should always be armed with a mirror, a feedback loop, and the knowledge that we are probably wrong in the way we see things. We don't need to be passive. Curiosity and love aren't passive... and we both know a dude who lived 2000 years ago who was both. (10/10) Brett:
i really just wanted to say 'Yes!' as my final comment but people would suspect it wasn't me. i love the idea of being "armed with a mirror, a feedback loop, and the knowledge that we are probably wrong in the way we see things" and also that "curiosity and love aren't passive". i have the strongest belief that whether people believe Jesus was God or not, we can learn so very much from the way He lived and the things He said. If there was ever someone who so completely got it. But He was known to shout and throw things when necessary and so again i will invoke the Both/And and suggest that perhaps one of the biggest challenges we face is figuring out the timing and audience for both. Jesus tended to humble [humiliate?] those who felt like they had it or knew it or were it. The woke crowd of His day perhaps? So maybe the biggest lesson out of all this is that we can leave the Saviouring to Jesus and seek to live out our curiosity and love unashamedly, while not giving in to who the world suggests should and shouldn't be loved.
Pronounced like 'Duh' in American, De (å¾·) is something like charisma and confidence... but deeper soaked and with less to prove. Someone with De radiates an infectious and effortless sense of calm. It is a dancing partner of the Chinese concept of Wu Wei. Action through Inaction. It starts with deeply embracing things as they are. Letting go of the gap/chasm that normally exists to how we want them to be. Replacing the intense effort to cross that gap. Embracing spontaneity, suddenly everything that seemed to be a struggle starts to flow.
Being busy is not a sign of being successful. It is a conspicuous way of demonstrating that your time is very valuable to other people - even if it isn't. Much like finishing your work early, but then not leaving for home because you don't want to appear lazy. When you are starting a small business, there is no point in doing that. Your boss lives in your head. Chris Gardener has written a book for small business owners called 'The Busyness Delusion'. After several years working with various small businesses in an auditing capacity, then as an independent Financial Director, he has developed a framework to help those who want to venture out on their own to develop Financial Security. The kind that creates the foundation for the freedom to pursue the things that really matter to you. Which doesn't include being busy for the sake of it.
The rules, and intent, of a game have a direct impact on the decisions made. It is really difficult, and not always useful, as a person to 'pretend'. You have to actually believe the thing you are pretending is true.
A pet peeve of mine is when someone says 'think like an owner'. My internal response is, 'I can only think like an employee trying to think like an owner'. So if you want someone to think like an owner, make them an owner. That is one of the reasons I am a fan of Universal Basic Income. If seen as a dividend on Communal Wealth, it genuinely gives everyone an inalienable ownership stake in society.
An example of the rules affecting the decisions is Investment Clubs. Someone can be told to pick a business 'with a long-term philosophy' for a 12-month game. 12 months is not a long-term. In order to win the game, you either have to smash the ball out of the park or you will lose. Over the long-term, the people who typically amass think a little like Buffett's 'concentrating on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over rather than ... acquiring any ability to clear seven-footers.' The person who wins the 12-month game is not necessarily the person who followed the intent.
12h 06m after starting the 89km Comrades Marathon (2016)
Endurance is a vital aspect of wealth creation. It isn't about short-term wins. It is often more about avoiding stupidity than being particularly clever. As Seth Klarman says, 'The real secret to investing is that there is no secret to investing. Every important aspect of value investing has been made available to the public many times over, beginning in 1934 with the first edition of Security Analysis.' Like eating healthily and staying fit, the challenge isn't in knowing what to do. It is in actually doing it. It is in building up the capacity not to stop doing it. That is far more about Emotional Intelligence than any particularly profound insight.
It all starts with knowing your intent. Believing your intent. Then putting that into practice.
Daniel Dennett's book 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' changed my understanding of evolution. I had heard the idea in 'The Red Queen', but it hadn't sunk in. Survival of the Fittest can suggest we know in advance who the fittest is. That isn't how it works. A lot of random stuff happens. With sufficient diversity, something can survive even if almost everything doesn't. If 5% survives *and can rebuild*, then we can cope with some pretty big knocks. The Red Queen in Wonderland says, 'it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place'. The important thing isn't the destination, or even knowing what is going to happen. Too much is uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. We can't know. The important thing is the running. The being. The ability to cope. Always be at least 5% okay.
In George Orwell's Animal Farm, things start bad for the animals. The Revolution brings hope but things get awful fast. Everything is bad... but everything is made out to be great. Bryan Caplan says we currently live in the same chasm between the truth and reality, but in the opposite direction. Reverse Animal Farm. We spend so much time on terror, fear, brutality, and poverty that we don't see the progress we are making. I strongly believe the world is less racist, sexist, homophobic and violent than in the past. That doesn't mean there isn't lots of work to do. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of awful stories to show that things are 'getting worse' in isolation. Somehow we need to keep the sense of urgency, while being half-hearted fanatics - still making time to celebrate, enjoy, play, be silly and then crack on with the heavier stuff.
Both books are packed with the darker elements of human emotion; both books are raw and uncomfortable and face the relentless meaninglessness and even loneliness that assails us, that is so wrapped up in the human condition.
I like Lamentations precisely because it is a book that doesn't ask people to "praise through the storm" or a book that holds up some future hope, in fact it is the minimal hope, the misery, the wailing and almost crushing sense of destitution that moves me in the book..........
While I understand the exhortations in the Psalms and other places, I despise happy clappy religion; religion that reduces the mess and complexity and excess of the human experience, that dulls the cry of the heart, because it is in only facing our own darkest emotions, in being able to sit silently while the tears stream down and face ourselves that we can find our humanity, our deepest sense of compassionate wisdom.
In the story of the Good Samaritan, most translations say the man was "moved with pity"(or some derivative of it) when he saw the man beaten, lying on the side of the road. If you read this passage in the original language, a better translation would be to say that, "his guts writhed with compassion" when he saw the man destitute and beaten, that is to say he had a visceral, gut-punch, a deeply human response when he saw the man and because of that he was moved to go the absolute extra mile for him.
He knew.
He knew destitution. He knew brokenness. He knew it could have been him and unlike the Levite and priest, his humanity superseded any rules of cleanliness, any excuses not to help the man, because he saw himself in that man.
He knew at that moment what it meant to love his neighbour as himself...........
We are human first and everything else second.
I hate happy clappy religion so much, precisely because it loses sight of this, loses sight of the mess and complexity and excess of being human, because out of those things are born neighbourliness and compassionate wisdom and love, because love perfects through suffering.
"Elahi! Elahi! Lama Sabachtani" is viscerally human.
It's messy. It isn't resolving. It's just the cry of a human heart.
Proust is one of the world's most celebrated authors. I haven't read any Proust. I am unfortunately almost monotongue. I have read 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' which celebrates what paying attention, and looking closely, can add to your life. It also points out the beauty that came from Proust relentlessly editing his writing. Coming back to it. Making notes. Rewriting. Often we move on quickly through thoughts. Too quickly. Both our own, and those of others. Things can be read out of context. How they are understood can depend on the mood of the reader. What they read before. In a world with so much information thrown at us, perhaps we don't do enough chiseling.
There are a few books I have read that stand out as having challenged a deeply held belief of mine. Books that made me pause sufficiently long to change path. I have long considered myself liberal. A Word I associate with tolerance, and willingness to listen and learn. Homo Deus looks at the roots of liberalism in the enlightenment and humanism. The raising of the rights of the individual over the state. Human Rights. The book, along with Illiberal Reformers has made me far less comfortable with the idea of the individual as the basic unit of who we are. Less comfortable with the idea of Progress, especially when imposed on others in civilising missions.
As we move to a connected world, where Artificial Intelligence can listen to the internally competing ideas and signals of our emotions, relationships and experiences - the day may soon come where others understand us better than we understand ourselves. Ideas of self, free-will, autonomy, trust and decision making will be turned on their head. This is an important book.
Positive goals can have unintended consequences. One push back on liberalism is a push back on individualism and selfishness. A suggested answer is to create bigger groups. This allows us to focus on something bigger than ourselves. If that group is defined by its differences from others, even though that difference is common ground within the ingroup, it leads to the same negative effects that repulse us from selfishness. Thomas Leonard tells of the progressive movements push to give moral gravity to bigger groups of the individual. To focus on the 'nation, state, society, commonwealth, public, people, race, and, especially, the social organism'. If the story we use to build our confidence is a story that pushes us above others, by finding strength in others like us, that isn't a push back on individualism. That is just redefining the divided individual.
Yogis believe everything we see is Maya. An illusion that clouds reality. How we see the world is our story. The closest we can come to truth as beings that think by separating and connecting ideas. Through categories and boundaries. Harari's 'Sapiens' is a history of our shared stories. The layer of meaning we add to what we experience to help it make sense, and help us function in a very confusing world. Through Empires, Religion, Nations, Money, Science and various other tools of communication, our worlds have become more connected. Our consciousness more shared. This is a powerful book to read for anyone interested in community building, or how and why we interact.
