On Loop

I enjoy the series Westworld. It fits with my sense of how we live in “controlled hallucinations” at different levels of awareness. How much of our experience seems impacted by our founding stories, driving ambitions, and ingrained habits. Our loops. When my wife asks what I am doing today, I often respond that I am “On loop”. As a creature of habit, I really like the idea of micro-ambition. Building a daily practice I have confidence in. Where I feel like each day is a nibble forward. Not towards a specific goal. The world is too complex, ambiguous, and random for that. I don’t like the idea of the destination being more important than the journey. I prefer a process of story enrichment. Adding feedback to my loop. As quickly as possible. So today, builds on yesterday. Building endurance to create space for time. Building resilience to manage and thrive off the risks. Building creativity to gradually compound learning. Building my loop.

           

Möbius strip

Better than the Book

The book was better. The book was probably better. The book gets more time to build the characters and can add more information. It isn't on the clock. If you have read Game of Thrones or The Lord of the Rings, and then watched the TV Series or Movie, you will see how plots have to change slightly. Characters get joined. The 'facts' largely stay the same, but to make the story flow, things have to change. Conn Iggulden does the same thing with his historic novels about Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar and the War of the Roses. In the appendix, he explains the changes he has made to make the story flow. The combinations. The alterations. The ordering of events.

Life is better than the book. There is more space to add details. There is less need for consistency in order for the story to flow. We tend to add the story afterwards as we explain our lives. As we talk to our friends. As we justify what we have done. As we plan what we are going to do. 

While looking for the way things are connected, I am also trying hard to let go of plot. To let go of pattern. To let go of connections that don't matter. To revel in glorious inconsistency. There is a lot of noise. A lot of things happen for no reason. There isn't always a string of causes. There isn't always an intent. Sometimes things just are.

We are natural story tellers. Life is far more interesting than that. It can let go of narratives. It can do things out of character.

Life provides the tools. We create our own stories.

Nature without Narrative

Reconciling Jaimeness

I am a big fan of TV shows like 'The Wire' and plays like 'Wicked'. The Wire leaves you deeply unsettled for the first few episodes of each season. There is no clear, self-contained point of each episode. There is no narrative structure we can smugly project forward in order to guess what happens. Unlike Friends episodes which can be summarised as 'The one with...', it is more like being parachuted into a real life situation. You have to watch and slowly (most of) the mist will rise.

I like this because it allows characters to build in bits and pieces. You aren't instructed who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. There are good cops and bad cops. There are good drug dealers and bad drug dealers. Good cops do bad things. Bad cops do good things. Really bad people do heroically good things. This seems to reflect the way the world is better than 'The Good Witch of the North' and 'The Wicked Witch of the West'. Which is why I loved how 'Wicked' turned the whole story I grew up with on its head while sticking to the 'facts' and time line of the story. It was an interpretation. Much like we view history.

Reading 'The Fall of the Ottomans', I am struck by how the Muslim world's path towards a secular society with constitutional rule was interrupted and halted by the European Game of Thrones otherwise known as the First World War. I am no historian, but it is hard to figure out a good or bad side from what I have read.

Rebecca Davis touches on this in a chapter of the hilarious 'Best Whites and other Anxious Delusions' recounting how she guards against being charmed by people she is interviewing. Only to find out they are rapists or murderers. The world makes more sense when people are good or bad. The idea that we can be charmed by evil is deeply disturbing. Just like it is almost impossible to know how much of our success to attribute to privilege, we have absolutely no idea what sort of evil acts we are capable of give the right toxic mix of circumstances. If you don't want to believe this, don't read 'The Lucifer Effect'.

Early examples of fallen heroes for me include Hansie Cronje and Lance Armstrong. Of the two I am struggling with at the moment, one is fictional. I don't know how on earth to emotionally respond to Jaime Lannister. Progressively through Game of Thrones they have turned him from an evil dude into someone it is harder and harder not to like. But then there is that scene. The one that makes Borat look like a politically correct movie. I had even 'forgiven' him for pushing a little boy from a tower. That scene on the other hand... The real life one is Bill Cosby. I grew up with the friendly, funny father figure from The Cosby Show. I can't reconcile that character, and the public persona of the actor, with his Jaimeness.

I can see why we like clarity. We can throw water at a problem and watch it melt away. Reality is much more messy.

Catching a Hoodwink (by Phillipa Norman)

Guest Post: Phillipa Norman

Some friends connect to such a degree that the distinction between family and friends melts away. I love the term family friends. The Blacks and the Normans were such friends growing up. I can remember watching Nelson Mandela's release sitting on one of their super awesome bean bags. I loved those things. Dad Norman used to wrestle us in the pool. He was a man mountain. Mom Norman made the most awesome milk tart in the world. Phillipa was young enough to reliably be called upon to expose her brothers hiding places when it came to hide and go seek. The Normans invaded the land of the long white cloud in the early 00's. In 2011, I ventured to that spiritual home of rugby to see the World Cup and catch up with the adult versions of my childhood buddies. It was there that I met Sam who will become Graham's wife shortly. I am heading out again on Sunday to join the festivities and then to hang around for a couple of months down under.

Phillipa has developed the art of hide and seek to a new level as part of the Judges' Research Counsel at the Christchurch District Court. She tells us some of her secrets...

With the Boks out, Pip & I chose Wales and Sam & Graham Australia in the fight for 3rd

Catching a Hoodwink
by Phillipa Norman

My friends and I are huge fans of the TV programme Broadchurch. On our weekly Sunday night views of Season 2, I regularly get told-off for pointing out the inaccuracies in criminal trial procedure and admissibility of evidence - "it's a TV show, suspend disbelief!"

A major premise of the show is that you as the viewer don't know who is lying and who is telling the truth (this also frustrates David Tennant). Watching actors try to convey the nuance of a character does actually reflect a major concern in the real world and the bread and butter of law courts, that is, whether someone is a liar. These impressions, whether they are in our everyday lives, professional or business worlds or in the jury box, can be high stakes, as in the case of a defendant's liberty, or comparably minor and domestic - has your child really finished their homework?

We have several tools to assess a person's truthfulness (veracity), credibility and ultimately the reliability of what they are saying. We listen, we assess for consistency, plausibility and we compare it with what we do know about that person or thing.

Likewise, for years we have been told by social scientists that the majority of human communication is non-verbal. So when it comes to deciding if someone is lying we tend to - consciously or unconsciously - interpret their facial expressions, body movement and vocal characteristics.

In a trial context this is referred to as witness demeanour. Conventional wisdom relates that liars look and sound shifty. We may think that we are quite good at telling when someone is lying. Certainly lawyers, Judges and psychologists think they are better than average at this. But an analysis of psychological studies of deception detection consistently shows that most people cannot do better than chance in discerning lies under laboratory conditions.

Many experiments have been conducted to gauge the extent to which observation of demeanour helps when assessing veracity. In one such experiment assessing the truth of respondents, half of the group was permitted to see and hear the interviews and thus assess the respondent's demeanour. The other half was restricted to reading a transcript of the interview.

The results were emphatic: behavioural cues popularly thought to be associated with lying - posture, head movements, shifty eyes, gaze aversion, fidgeting, and gesturing - have no correlation with dishonesty or lack of credibility. In fact, the study showed that visual information actually reduces observer accuracy and the ability to detect deceit. This appears to arise because popular liar stereotyping is primarily visual. The cues that do manifest with lying are so subtle that they are imperceptible to the ordinary person without sophisticated measuring equipment. Most people are nervous when they are being accused or interrogated. This increase the chances of "Othello error" - a false interpretation of stress and nervousness as lying (think poor Desdemona) and confidence and openness as truthfulness (think manipulative Iago). 

Othello & Desdemona and Iago

So what's the point? Should we never bother trying to accurately read a person's demeanour? Popular culture had picked up on the detection of micro-expressions which last for one fifteenth of a second (the TV show "Lie to Me" is one such example). However, only one person in 300 is capable of detecting micro-expressions without special training. Where we, as the average face-reading person, does better is at recognising a lite if it occurs in a predominantly truthful context. In a setting where virtually no lies are told, the rate at which the distinction between truth and lies is accurately detected rises to about 60 per cent. Social science also emphasises the importance of intuition and unconscious appraisal of veracity which allows the brain time to integrate a more complete judgement of subtle cues that our conscious mind cannot quite perceive. However, I am suspicious of this advice - "intuition" or talk about "gut instinct", don't forget, are social constructions and often borne from internalised preconceptions and stereotypes.

In sum, there are good reasons for caution at overestimating your ability to detect a lie from just looking at a person, particularly if your job or role requires you to make important decisions about facts. The implication is, pay attention to other cues to deceit and give someone the benefit of the doubt.

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In writing a blog about several topics in which I admit to being a complete beginner, I am going to have to rely heavily on the people I am writing for who cumulatively know most of what I am likely to learn already. I would love it if some of you found the time to write a guest post on the subject of happiness or learning. The framework I use for thinking about these things is what I call the '5 + 2 points' which includes proper (1) exercise, (2) breathing, (3) diet, (4) relaxation, (5) positive thinking & meditation, (+1) relationships, (+2) flow. Naturally if you would like to write about something that you think I have missed, I would love to include that too. If you are up to doing something more practical, it would be awesome if you did a 100 hour project and I am happy to do the writing based on our chats if that is how you roll. Email me at trevorjohnblack@gmail.com 

Advice to Yourself

'All advice is autobiographical', says Austin Kleon. 'It's one of my theories that when people give you advice, they're really just talking to themselves in the past.' Stephen Fry also writes his autobiographies with his younger self as the target audience. He aims to write the books he wishes he could have read. Karl Popper's idea of  using imagination and creativity to come up with ideas, but then honing them is similar. It is actually quite easy to be self critical when the ideas are distant enough in the past that you feel detached from them. It doesn't feel personal anymore.

'These are men with bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas: they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures.' Karl Popper

I like the idea of writing letters to a younger self but I wonder about the butterfly effect. I am not sure I would want my younger self to read them. I have done some dumb things in the past and everyone has their share of misfortunes they could have avoided. The ability to go back and correct actions is very tempting, but the whole course of your and other people's lives would be affected. One of the ways I now try get over things is to do something really awesome that I couldn't have done if the bad thing hadn't happened. That way, it is difficult to wish that thing hadn't happened because then the next awesome thing wouldn't have happened.

Some advice is easy. To Trev who wrote his first blog post on 7 April 2006 - you spell blog with one g. It is short for web log. Use spell check. Read through things before you publish them.

My second post was later the same day and I described some of my first paintings. I also talk about growing tired with doing paintings of images done by other people and wanting to spend time learning photography so I could paint my own images. Well, 8 years later that dream is about receive some focus. On Friday, I moved out of the Wimbledon Art Studios after 4 years of learning about colour and texture with oil paint. I am now going to shift to sketching and photography, before starting to incorporate that back into my painting. 

My third and fourth posts are I imagine not unusual for people in their mid twenties. Truth is, I don't know what is typical for people at that age. I know what I was going through, and perhaps that is Kleon's point. The one is a stream of consciousness post which freaks me out reading. Taking creative output out of context can be dangerous. My Dad always used to worry about my early paintings which tended to focus on dark subject matter. I am a happy guy, but I can see how my work may have caused concern. I painted a cape flats prostitute who had been murdered, and a young polish girl who had been executed for stealing pigeons. I still love these paintings, but they are certainly less warm and fuzzy than some of my others. I think having freedom to explore some of the more unpleasant emotions helps build resilience. It also helps the good times taste sweeter. I am very pleased that we can explore these through art rather than experience. Watching series like 'Band of Brothers' seem to give a real sense of what it must have been like to be involved in a World War. I feel incredibly lucky to not live in a time when I had to be a part of that.

My fourth post was a 'Statement of Belief' based on JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. Rereading this I am probably still happy that it largely reflects my views, but would tweak some of the way I say it. I loved the quote from the Boondock Saints: I know only two things: (1) There is a God, and (2) I am not him. A university friend Phil used to say to me he disagrees with both. Having spent more time reading about Vedanta through the philosophical side of Yoga, I get what he meant. In Vedanta, they say that God or Brahman is the unchanging reality which cannot be described. Most people don't function with an explanation like that though. We need something to wrap our heads around. We need stories. Vedanta then uses the idea of Ishwara to be a form or description given to God by people. So for Muslims, this is Allah. For Christians it is Christ/God/The Holy Spirit. Dawkins doesn't use an Ishwara... his story of understanding the world doesn't need a central figure.

I got quite angry with the form of understanding I had. The story I used didn't make sense to me, and I used to boil at seeing the turmoil in the world and the idea that God allowed evil in the world. For me a world that is random with no malicious intent but something, whatever it is, that tends to move things forward over the long term makes more sense. The challenge I am now working with is 'making peace' with the story I had. There were lots of good bits. The great thing with stories is you don't have to discard them when you find a fault. You can tweak. You can correct typos, change characters and rewrite. Perhaps that is the point of having conversations with yourself from the past. Not to help the younger you, but to help you today.

Why'd you go an do that?

The Wire again....

I won't do spoilers about what happened, but...

In today's episode, something goes wrong for someone who has worked really hard to get themselves right. Sad thing is, the world is just like that. Sometimes things happen that make you really want to rewind the clock and start again. Sometimes they are snap decisions, and sometimes they are long periods of stupidity.

The problem is... if we could rewind and start again, we would probably be doing that all the time.

Most of the time, it is not as serious as incidents like this (season 3 about half way). But all of us have a thing or two. A decision, an action... a year that we would take back if we could.

I guess the point is to look forward and treat every moment as if you were being given a second chance to do what you are about to do over again.

Are you going to do tomorrow different this time?

All the piece matter

Like the subject matter, the series 'The Wire' is addictive. I have spoken before about how much I enjoy the move towards portraying the world as grey as it really is.

The old comic book stories of the goodies and the baddies is, to borrow a wire phrase, not how it goes down. The world is a murky murky place in which we make up rules to get by. As time goes by, those rules change as the world changes. Good people do bad things, bad people do good.

Series like this, as well as being entertaining, help us start to ask some of the right questions. It helps us figure out all the pieces.

Maybe the world is becoming more honest?

Heroes

A good friend just recommended Heroes and Californication to me. Both TV series. I try not watching a lot of TV... because if I followed Stuart's `Revealed Preference' Theory, I would just be watching TV all the time.

The various series that have been coming out have been of a really high quality in my opinion. I actually prefer them to movies. For years I have been a Smallville fan, and when `Superman Returns' came out, I was actually very disappointed. I think it was because I was comparing the two. Like comparing books to movies, that is pretty much a pointless exercise.

Series have the ability to develop characters that a movie can't do in just 90 minutes. Some movies do it, but it is still an impression. The good ones make a peircing impression that makes you feel like you know the characters. With series, they can do it over time.

Anyway, it seems I am now hooked on two more series... Heroes and Californication are very very cool. Yup, I know, Heroes is old... but I ration myself.

My favourites are Prison Break, Greys, Rome, Smallville and Dexter.

Dexter

If you don't watch it... do yourself a favour... Do.

Season 2 is well under way now, and due to poor timing on my own part is the only series I managed to catch. I am also a Greys, Prison Break and Smallville fan but unfortunately my lack of regular schedule meant I missed the start of each season and so now (due to my desire to watch them in order) I have to wait for the DVDs.

But Dexter is late night Sundays... 10pm.

And I tend to be home then.

All about a psychopathic vigilante serial killer working as a blood splatter analysts for the cops. Very well written, good acting and bloody funny.