I just re-read my 2013 review. What a year. It was by far the best year of my life… until 2014. I think 2015 can be even better. Who needs regression to the mean, anyway?
I like the object-level + process-level + meta-level structure I used last year, and I don’t have an obviously better structure to use this year. So here it goes again.
(FYI: I am both the maker of and a power-user of a productivity app called Complice. To help make things clearer, I’m going to use “Complice” to refer to the business or the app-with-me-as-maker and “complice” (lowercase c) to refer to the system-with-me-as-user. In most cases it’s obvious from context, but it’ll be helpful to know that I use it two ways.)
Object level is just like… stuff. Stuff I did. Accomplishments, or events I attended. It’s the “what”.
The first big thing that I was focused on was redesigning my site. This is a great example of a tangible goal that complice helped me achieve. A year ago, my site looked like the left/first image, below. shudders As of last February, it looks like the one of the right! So much more me! And with a new logo 🙂 I have new business cards too, that I get lots of compliments on.
Nate Soares just published the first article to The Mind’s UI, a group blog that I’ve set up with him and Brienne Yudkowsky. It’s called Enjoying the feeling of agency, and in it Nate said that one thing that helps with that enjoyment is
Context and framing: it’s much easier to draw satisfaction from a clean room if your mother didn’t make you clean it.
I wanted to elaborate on that, drawing on very recent (even ongoing) experiences of being home for the holidays.
I’ve spent the last year living in an intentional learning community (let’s call it LRC) that has a number of interesting features. One of these, as I’ve described before, is that nobody ever has to do the dishes. We have some agreements about how we want to keep the kitchen space and the cooking utensils available for use; even here, nobody ever yells or guilt trips people for not following them. At our best, we approach the act of giving that kind of feedback with openness and curiosity. Sometimes it produces experiences of frustration which are processed in a different way.
But the point is, for the most part, we all get to navigate the kitchen based on our own desires and needs, and our abilities to discern what makes sense. This is really relaxing. But that’s not the only reason we do it.
When I got back to Nova Scotia to see my family a couple weeks ago, I was amused to experience surprise when I saw a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink. I had become very accustomed to the fact that part of our dishing system in the LRC house where I live is that we stack dirty dishes next to the sink rather than in them, which makes for much better flow in various ways. I looked at the pile of dishes in the sink and figured that it would look a lot nicer if they were washed or put in the dishwasher. So I did that.
On Thursday evening, while I was packing for my flight home for christmas, my girlfriend announced “I took advantage of your trust and posted something to your facebook.” Based on what usually shows up in that kind of circumstance I was like “ack, better go delete it.” Instead, when I finally saw it, I was like “Damn. Why didn’t I think of this?” Fortunately, I could pretend I had thought of it.
It already had a dozen likes.
By the time she dropped me off at the Billy Bishop Airport in downtown Toronto, it had over a hundred. In fact, it had exactly 101. The Bishop Airport was the perfect place to do this, as it has a great lounge that feels really friendly, along with free food I could make small-talk about.
These are things I relearned. I basically already knew them, but the message got drilled in a lot deeper by the actual act of offering a hundred hugs.
CoZE, short for Comfort Zone Expansion, is the main lens that I used to understand what I was doing. I was expanding my comfort zone by offering a lot of hugs. Now, to some people, this would have been so far out of their comfort zones that it would have seemed way too daunting. For me, I knew it would be a challenge, but I figured I could do it if I really hustled.
So CoZE is great. I already knew that. One reason it’s great is because you deepen your experiential understanding of things. I’m sharing what I learned not because I think it’s things that you totally don’t know, but to try to tell the story of how this CoZE challenge taught me stuff. And because the stories herein are pretty great.
This was also a lot of fun. It’s fun to challenge yourself. Or can be, anyway.
It’s worth noting that while I definitely recommend that people try CoZE exercises, it’s important to make the world a better place in the process. When you’re offering or requesting something, do the best you can to make it easy for them to say no if they don’t want it, especially, especially something related to physical contact. Maybe even start just by holding up a free hugs sign as people walk by.
Now, without further ado, the other 8 things I relearned.
With the first few people I asked, I tried showing them the facebook post on my phone, then saying “would you like a hug?” and they refused, kind of awkwardly. Then I tried to give a more meaningful reason:
“I’m going home for the holidays, and to get warmed up for the season I’m giving hugs to strangers on the way. Would you like one?”
This worked a fair bit better, but I was able to improve it even more to the following:
“I’m travelling home for Christmas, and I have this thing I like to do where I hug as many strangers as I can on the way… Do you want a hug?”
I would often preface that with “so this is kinda random, but…”
I think the Christmas thing really helped. I might be able to come up with an almost-as-good framing some other time of year, but it would be hard. Holiday season is easy mode for friendly stranger CoZE.
I can’t say for sure, but I think that smiling warmly and holding out my arms was also pretty key.
A bunch of people asked me, at various times yesterday, if I noticed whether any demographics seemed more or less likely to go for the hug. I can confirm that nope, it was everyone. I think I had a slightly higher acceptance rate among women with grey or white hair (80-90% compared to the overall 70%) but there was no other obvious group that was for or against.
In particular, I recall striking up a conversation with a group of 4 dudes who were eating the cookies in the kitchenette area. They were heading to MontrĂ©al to party. As they were about to walk, I said “wait!” and proposed hugs. They were like “totally, man!” Maybe 10 minutes later, I walked by them, and they were with like 5 other friends, and the guys I’d originally met were like:
“Yo, Jake, you need to hug this guy!”
They got all but one of their friends to hug me. Which brings us to…
I hugged one woman who I thought was alone, and just moments later, she called out to her friend who was behind me, “Tanya, he’s giving Christmas hugs!” So Tanya got one. And then their other friend, who was initially reluctant, also got one.
I had a few people say, “if I’m doing it, you can do it,” or something along those lines. One person took a picture of me. Not of the hug, just “this was the guy who hugged me.” I posed for it.
At one point, I walked past a woman I’d just hugged, as she sat back down with a ~7-year-old boy (presumably her son), and I overheard her say “…Christmas hugs…”, and I said to him, “do you want one?” and he said sure!
I offered some hugs to a couple people in an area, some sitting, some standing. Another guy on the far side of that cluster of people (not friends as far as I could tell) whom I hadn’t explicitly addressed, stood up and said “I’m getting in on those hugs!”
Some people were really struck by delight at the prospect of a Christmas hug from a stranger in an airport, including quotes like, “Wow, that really brightened my day!”
The most touching moment of my hugs adventure happened in the Halifax Airport, after I landed. I was on my way from the plane to the baggage claim, offering hugs to people who looked huggable as I went. A woman with short white hair looked me in the eye and said:
“I’m a cancer survivor, so I always say yes to hugs…”
Ultimately I feel pretty confident that this effort had a net positive effect on the people I interacted with.
“Give ME a hug?! I’m gonna give YOU a hug!”
“I’m not gonna hug you. But you can hug me.”
(she was fine with being embraced, just didn’t want to put her arms around me herself)
“I can’t, I have a sore shoulder.”
“How about if I just put my arm around you?”
“Sure!”
“Here, just squeeze my hand.” *smile* “That’s a hug.”
“What, do I have to get up?”
(he was down for a hug but refused to get up for a hug.)
The strongest negative reaction I got was when I offered hugs to a couple of women waiting to depart in Halifax, and they looked at me incredulously and said, “You’ve got the wrong crowd, man…”
I chatted up one of the pilots in the cockpit while the plane was refueling in Ottawa, and he said “so you’re going home for Christmas?” which I used to segue into my offer. He said no, which was probably for the best since he was all strapped in. But yeah, this challenge definitely made me a lot more social.
There were a few encounters that were a little bit awkward, but other than that almost all of over one hundred hug offers was totally friendly and pleasant.
…including when I tried my line on people I’d already hugged. (I’d been super freaked out about that one happening, and it was totally fine.)
Throughout the whole thing, I was posting my hug count (as a fraction of hugs/offers) to the facebook thread that started it all. It was really motivating to know that my friends around the world could see my progress live. And I mean, I needed to keep track somewhere. But it really helped to have the accountability.
I made sure to make the official count (what needed to get to 101) be something under my control—hug offers—rather than something someone else would need to consent to. That way I wasn’t trying to manipulate them into hugging me so I could get points. I got all of the important points just from trying.
But I wanted to get actual hugs too. In the end, I had 71 hugs out of 101 offers. Not bad! That ~70% was pretty consistent throughout the day, including exactly 7/10 and 35/50, as well as 50/70, which was how many I had before the plane took off.
I wish I’d made a prediction for how many I’d get, but I didn’t so I’m not going to pretend that “that’s how many I thought I’d get” or whatever. Retrodictions don’t count. I will say that at one point it was around 50% and I was thinking “I really hope I can get at least half,” which indicates I definitely wasn’t confident that I would.
One of the coolest parts was that one guy started watching me and then when I would come back to the table he was at, he would ask me how it was going, what my success rate was like, and so on. At one point he said,
“I got some pictures of those hugs!”
“What?”
“Lemme show you…”
He emailed me one of them, which is… here!
“What’s the catch?” asked someone. I also got some looks and remarks to the effect of “and then what?” or “so now what?” which I usually would just respond to with a happy shrug, “That’s it! Just a hug.”
I think my favourite remark, the whole day, was made by this guy at the baggage claim in Halifax. He would have been like person 93 or so. I said
“So I’m going home for christmas, and I’m trying to hug as many—”
and he just interrupted me and said
“Shuttup with your social experiment and get over here!”
There’s an obscure concept (from an obscure field called semantics) that I find really fun to think with: Dot Objects. This post is an attempt to pull it out of that technical field and into, well, the community of people who read my blog. I think that semantics tools are fundamental for rationality and quality thinking in general—Alfred Korzybski, coiner of the phrase “the map is not the territory” and founder of the field general semantics, would probably agree with me. Note that I extrapolate a ton here, so (disclaimer!) don’t take anything I say as being true to the technical study of the subject.
So. Consider the sentence: “The university needed renovations, so it emailed its alumni to raise funds.” The university that has the alumni isn’t the one that needs the repairs. One is an organization, the other is a physical structure.
Dot objects are
entities that subsist simultaneously in multiple semantic domains.[1]
The name “dot objects” (also sometimes “dot types”) comes from the notation used in academic papers on the subject, which is X • Y where X and Y are the two domains. So the above example might be Org • Phy.
Context: this was a very stream-of-consciousness post, tapping into something I had just learned when I wrote it, yesterday. I don’t necessarily think that what I suggest here makes sense for everyone. But it spoke something really valuable to me, and I suspect there will be others who deeply appreciate it as well.
Today, my friend Matt and I found ourselves in a particular head-space as well as an intense and exciting conversation where we were speeding up, and were continually needing to remind ourselves to take a breath. I found each breath so powerfully pleasant that it made for a really interesting feedback loop. Note that all uses of “breath(e)” here refer to the act of consciously, mindfully, taking a breath.
I’m going to invite you to do that now, as you read this.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The “take a breath” piece of feedback is part of a much larger energy-awareness thing I’ve been working with for a long time—it’s connected with againstness and so on as well. Essentially, I’ve been working to overcome an experience I’ve sometimes had of myself where I’ve gotten slightly caught up in my own thoughts and slightly worked up, while interacting with people, in ways that have felt disconnecting and unpleasant for them. And in general, when people have given me feedback about this, I’ve had largely positive reactions in response.
What I realized today though, was that it could be even more positive. Or perhaps we might say positive “sooner”.
This is a topic for another post, but I want to briefly present a model I’ve been using for awhile to capture the process of human interaction with the world.
My blog post titles have been getting weirder and weirder. This one’ll make sense by the end, I swear.
At recommendation by Kenzi at the Center for Applied Rationality, I’ve been reading the book Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy right now, which is based around the following premises:
“You will never be caught up.”
“There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.”
However, this only works if you actually have the focusing ability to turn [intending to do the most important thing] into not just doing it but finishing it. And you need to be able to trust yourself to do that. This post explores a particular kind of failure mode that occurs if you don’t have that kind of trust.
The titular frogs refer to » read the rest of this entry »
A lot of people have patterns in their relationships (particularly romantic or familial) that cause them to get upset, bizarrely intensely. These patterns have built up over years of experience pushing each others’ buttons. I’ve done a lot of work on these kinds of patterns over the last few years and have made substantial progress, to the point where I’m no longer particularly worried about getting angry at my parents or partners. Even my younger sister, for the most part. (If she’s reading this, she’s probably saying “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED”)
But I still have a massive class of relationships that need serious work: my relationships with technology.
I have an eye for design—it’s part of why I went into Systems Design Engineering for undergrad. Being a designer is a great skill to have, for the most part. But it comes with a big drawback: you notice bad design.
And most things, it turns out, are badly designed.
There are reasons for this, of course. Big organizations are hard to coordinate. Points of failure are often hard to foresee.
I came to the realization a few weeks ago that some of my biggest potential growth in the dimension of againstness-y responses is in this domain. I noticed that my defensiveness in social situations is fading broadly—though not gone, not yet—and I was switching more and more to curiosity as a default mode of interaction. My patterns around poorly-designed products, however, seemed as strong as ever.
I found myself realizing that I felt entitled to well-designed products. Honestly, even as I write this, it feels hard to let go of the idea that I am. But I’m not. I’m not entitled to well-designed products. Even when » read the rest of this entry »
…as I wandered around, downtown…
looking around at all the faces…
trying to… recognize the places
their minds must be—
to generate the shapes I seesimulate them on my own features
the body is my teacher
of how they feel
making these strangers real
to me
So go some of the lyrics in a song I wrote last year, “Lost & Found”. Listen to it here.
I was thinking about these lines again today as I walked down Mission Street in San Francisco, the “downtown” to which these lyrics referred. I just arrived yesterday, back for the first time in over 7 months.
I found myself now, as then, looking at the faces of people I passed, and shifting my own face to match their expressions. In addition to getting a workout for both my facial muscles and my empathy centers, I’ve learned a few interesting things from this easy exercise.
You can walk past 10 different people, and your face will do 10 different things. Some might be similar in various ways, but they’re all distinct, which I find really curious—I got no sense of there being more or less popular faces, particularly.
Growth mindset is a thing. You can read lots more about it elsewhere, including Mindset by Carol Dweck, which has a 4.5 star rating with >500 reviews. I’m not here to explain in-depth what it is or why it matters. Enough people have done that. I’m here to show you how to do it—applied growth mindset. Importantly, this will include examples of fixed mindset that you can practice reframing to be more growthy.
But in case you’re unfamiliar, let’s start with one-sentence definitions, adapted from Dweck:
In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities are simply fixed traits, and use their performance to document those traits.
In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed, and improved upon, which creates a love of learning and a resilience.
But it’s one thing to know how to answer all of Test Your Mindset questions so that you get “Growth” as a result. It’s another to actually operate out of growth mindset consistently.
First I want to note that both growth mindset and fixed mindset have the delightful property of being self-reinforcing. People who have growth mindset will tend to improve, which will reinforce the idea that ability is learnable. People who have fixed mindset will tend to stagnate, which will reinforce the idea that they’re stuck with whatever ability level they currently have.
This is exciting, because it means that to some extent, you can get out of this just by deciding to have the other mindset, in part by recognizing that all of the evidence you currently have is determined by the mindset you have and is thus untrustworthy as evidence of “how things actually, fundamentally work”. That there’s an explanation for the-experiences-that-come-with-fixed-mindset that makes sense in growth mindset too. So you can reinterpret everything and switch mindsets.
And, it takes practice to actually operate from a growth mindset, rather than just conceptually understanding that it’s a good idea to do so. In my experience, a lot of this practice can happen on the level of reframing verbal expression, where you can shift your language from fixed to growth mindset. This in turn will shift your thoughts. That’s what this post is about. The practice of thinking growthily. » read the rest of this entry »
I’ve experimented with focus blocks before, where I’m working a large percentage of the time and when I’m not working I’m only engaging in distractions that are centering, rather than divergent. Following in the footsteps of some other entrepreneurs that I admire, I decided to make this entire weekend a focus block. I closed out my email inbox friday afternoon, and didn’t open it again until sunday. And I got a lot done.
Like the others, I made a timelapse video. I’m kicking myself now, because I didn’t confirm that I had a functional system on Linux for recording my webcam and then turning it into a timelapse. Meaning it took me way longer (read: several hours today pulling my hair out while staring at my screen) to create this video than would have been reasonable, and it’s not even sync’d the whole time. But I know how to do it better next time, and can probably push out a video with 30mins at most of post-processing, provided I set things up well at the start. I learned a bunch about the ffmpeg and sed tools though, which was helpful. I’ll post my scripts once I fix the aforementioned problem.
An app that pings you at totally random intervals and gets you to tag what you’re doing. The pings are on average every 45 minutes, but sometimes will be within seconds, or hours apart, so you never know. tagti.me »
