Reflecting on what I'm good at, reflecting on reflecting

I'm turning 33 in a few days and I think that has me reflecting on my status in life. What surprises me is that I sometimes feel like a mid-twenty-something, and people often mistake me for that and treat me accordingly. I'm certainly more confident now than I was when I was, say, 26. Experience has shown me what I'm good at and for those things I'm bad at, it's given me the maturity to seek out help and improve to the extent feasible. But I still don't quite have the authority I associate with some of my peers in age, let alone my elders. Maybe it has something to do with having kids. You could say they exude a parental authority.

I've been recently having the experience of working alongside people who are particularly competent in at least a couple specific areas. It has me realizing how much better I can be at certain things, and wondering what sort of fundamental phenomena underlie the performance I'm observing. Two very fundamental intelligences or abilities are emerging in the theory I've got so far. The first is decisiveness: a capacity to make quick, sufficiently effective decisions. I think the key here is avoiding paralysis analysis that's driven by anxiety. That's driven by such internal monologue as, "Did I forget something?" and leads you to keep doubling-back to the same areas of mental exploration, never coming to a solid mental clarity on the state of a particular aspect, and making progress difficult. In the process you also risk losing the bigger picture, since by spreading ad hoc mental analysis out in time you push the limits of short-term memory. It's rumination. It's obsessive and compulsive. Some people just don't do it but those who do need to be able to recognize it and intervene to keep it from gumming up their thought process. This is reminding me of an article I read long ago about the nature of genius, describing it as a quicker certainty of analysis than the vast majority of people exhibit, so my elaboration here can be thought of as exploring the details of that.

The other fundamental ability is related. It entails being able to store, retain, and extend successive aspects of a mental model, successive considerations in making a decision. The first ability is about being able to recognize — recognize when you're ruminating, recognize the cognitive consensus your thoughts are converging on — then make a definitive mental note to facilitate progressing thoughts and progressing actions. This second ability is less about recognizing a conclusion and more about building out a mental space — a diagram, if you would — of the matter under consideration or the system you're examining, for whatever purpose. You can think of it as a prerequisite to recognizing a conclusion, though on close examination I think we'll find there isn't so clear-cut a sequence. The key to it is restrained imagination. The imagination enables the visualization — or for the less visually-oriented — a math-sense or body-sense or sound representation of the topic. Keeping this imaginary world restrained is necessary to keep it from growing so big you start losing pieces of it, or losing track of what you were trying to accomplish to begin with. I can't plan properly if I keep forgetting a constraint. For some reason the example I'm coming up with right now is deciding to plan a bike trip while one of my arms is in a cast — probably not the greatest solution to the question of how I should spend my weekend. Maybe a couple days reading something engaging at home would be a better idea.

Imaginary worlds grow too big or unwieldy (unless you've really committed preexisting components to memory) when you start to contemplate tangents, or when you keep getting distracted by completely unrelated thoughts — invasive thoughts — but then keep trying to come back. I would argue that the latter places a lot of downward pressure on how big your imaginary world can manageably be. If your mental flow is punctuated by a fleeting but momentarily consuming thought about an issue at home, or what kind of music you want to listen to later, etc., then in the interim your mental world atrophies. You start losing pieces that would have stayed in place otherwise. When I tune into the introspective currents that are more or less constantly flowing through me over the course of my day, I can feel the looming threat of such distracting invasive thoughts. I can feel emergent impulse to break away from reflecting on a statement my colleague just made or a thought I just had about my code. I think a lot of it has to do with the habits and lifestyles that tend to come with having a smartphone. I've cultivated enough ongoing awareness — metacognition or mindfulness — that I'm able to continue directing my thoughts when something else threatens to take over, but I'd like to be better. I'd like fewer instances of something threatening a takeover at all. This is all just a long way of saying I want to improve my ability to focus, concentrate, and act. I think it starts with putting yourself on a sort of stimulation diet and seeing lines of thinking and action through without pivoting to something else, until you build up enough agency to handle a higher-stimulation environment with more moving parts.

How does adopting technology and knowledge impact quality of experience?

A fundamental pattern in history is the adoption of technology and associated or prerequisite knowledge and its impact on the quality of the experiences of those around it. The advent of history — the written word, a way of storing and transmitting knowledge of events — is itself an instance of this phenomenon. With the advent of history, societies changed, the quality of life of their members changed, their way of understanding the world and how they responded to it changed. This broad idea transcends time and scale. We can examine the impact of technology and knowledge on a contemporary business, its performance, and employee satisfaction. We can apply the lens backwards in time and ask ourselves how the development of technology and knowledge — say, Newtonian physics — impacted a society's economy, its cosmology, and the opportunities it afforded different members in education, work, or other ways of achieving their ends. Similarly, we can look at the impact of, say, the tech industry in San Francisco or Boston on the lives of their communities today.

A key tenet in the exploration of this question must explicitly address a common (today and in the past) assumption that additional technology and knowledge is inherently better. The benefits of technology and knowledge are ubiquitous but that notion is not fundamentally true. There are technologies we decide to ban or never pursue — chemical weapons, human genetic engineering, personal data mining — because the implications are at odds with the values we converge on as a society. Likewise, additional knowledge is not always a good thing. It can introduce noise into a system and compromise decision-making.

Quality of experience as a term encapsulates several ideas. First, it refers to the way in which a person understands the universe, how it works, and their role in those dynamics. An early Christian sees the earth as the center of the universe and the outcome of their life as a function of how they have conformed to the prescriptions set out by God and articulated by their religious community. A fatalist sees little role for individual agency in their life. An ambitious professional in our day easily sees the world and their life as a series of challenges-turned-opportunities in advancing their stature. Second, the term refers to the emotional element of how a person relates to their ideas of the world. When my world is a battle between good and evil, I might regularly experience trepidation, wariness, pious resolve. In a more epicurean world where I think I should be enjoying my life, there's greater levity and I might find myself in a mode that's more impulsive, indulgent, and celebratory. The impressions we have of what the world is, and how we define our relationship to that world around us — is it safe? am I responsible for things? — determine how we feel about life and ourselves. This is separate but related to quality of life, which is defined by more external, observable factors, such as mortality and literacy rates, nutrition, income, etc. It's also worth noting that one's mental model and ensuing emotional existence determines character and behavior. Will my piety make me magnanimous and kind, or vindictive and strict? Will my hedonism make me appreciative and fun, or insatiable and reckless?

Do most people struggle?

The segment of society I grew up in struggled to overcome barriers to basic steps. We struggled to get out of bed, to make that phone call, to leave the house on time. It's a lifestyle defined by loose ends, unfinished starts, or just unstarted starts. I saw it in my mom, her friends, my cousins, and myself until I cultivated better habits. I wonder what it is that puts us in this state and keeps us there on so many counts, for years, and too often for whole lives.

I have seen the alternative. I saw it in more functional classmates in school, in neighbors, in people at shops and offices who took care of their affairs in a more organized, proactive, and timely manner. These people often were members of a different socioeconomic category — more affluent, more stable, with more resources and options. Was it a cause or an effect of their mode? More likely than not the relationship wasn't unidirectional.

A troubling aspect of my observations is that I don't think I've seen the same predicament in other parts of the world. Living in Ukraine and China — and traveling extensively through other parts of the world not exactly known for affording wealth or opportunities to ordinary citizens — I find the constraint is not the initiative of locals but the opportunities they have. There's probably sampling bias coming into play here. In my years abroad I taught English, and that standing lent itself to putting me in contact with the more proactive sort, those who took the initiative to acquire a foreign language. Outside of the classroom I saw taxi drivers, proprietors, and consumers vying for improved standing or the accumulation of wealth. Perhaps that segment that struggles remains disproportionately and significantly invisible to the public eye. They're not in evening classes or working a gig or running their errands. They're languishing behind closed doors, in dark spaces, working to muster the energy to engage their worlds toward their own benefit.

Could there be something singularly American about the struggles I saw intimately growing up, and that I still occasionally brush up against? One differentiating aspect of America is that for all of our wealth, our income distribution is pretty warped, leaving big segments of society feeling inferior to others. Could that account for the paralysis? Pop science articles have told me that this sort of perception has an adverse effect on well-being. Even in a place like Ukraine, where a small elite has an incredible amount of wealth, the rest of society is clustered closely together in poverty, establishing a sense of camaraderie among most citizens even, with the rich — oligarchs — operating as a uniting opponent in some ways.

Looking into the past I think about the trials of simpler societies, of hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers, and pioneers. Of serfs and slaves. Accounting for infant mortality, I'm told life expectancy wasn't so terrible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Still I'm not convinced that a typical life in cities, on farms, or on manors was beyond daily struggle. Plague, turmoil, war, famine, and other misfortunes were far more significant factors then than for the American lifestyles I'm familiar with today. My friend imagines that if he were a fourteenth-century peasant reflecting on his life, he'd likely recall big holidays, weddings, festivals and the like as the highlights, before struggles to make ends meet or navigate the vagaries of society. I think he's right. The hard work of earlier or less affluent times and places is taken as a given and fades into the background of consciousness. It's a constant. The highlights are the deviations.

Would the people I think of as struggling today have a comparable experience? I'm not so sure. Again, I think of the heterogeneity of society, and the unavoidable dissemination of media and information that draws their attention to their relative standing. I think a lot of people today understand themselves as marginalized have-nots. The operative word there is marginalized. When you see yourself as part of a community overcoming poverty more or less together, even allowing for the occasional exception — the duke, the lord, the chief, the mandarin — you're more likely to take comfort in the notion of a solidarity or at least a relative fairness in working toward well-being or livelihood in parallel with peers. I'm suggesting that in turn that comfort can strengthen someone against the sort of rut that can take down initiative.

Interesting connections

Christine, Joseph, and MySpace

I met two of my best friends on MySpace. This was back in 2004 when it was just taking off. Before people were inundated with social media it was far more acceptable to reach out and forge bonds with strangers. Nowadays people tend to add as a contact on LinkedIn or Facebook only those people they've met in real life. So, even though I lived in a different city than them at the time, Christine and Joseph, who were roommates, stumbled upon me and reached out on account of my professed interests in electronic music, body modification, and the Soviet Union. We grew close over the next few years and we're still friends. I visited each of them in their respective domiciles as recently as this summer.

Ford Seven and Girl Talk

Christine and Joseph eventually connected me to a place called Ford Seven. Just a sprawling apartment in an old building in Cleveland—sprawling enough to roller skate! The place was known for its antics and events. This is where the mashup artist Girl Talk played some of his first shows, and he took off from there. Another character who was a part of that scene was Antonio. He's a gifted hairstylist by all accounts, so gifted he was even Courtney Love's personal stylist. Well, at least for a few weeks. I never got the full story on what happened there.

The Fund and Street Fight Radio

The Fund (aka the Fund for Public Interest Research) recruits young idealistic (and/or desperate) people to fundraise for nonprofits, either door-to-door or by accosting people on the street. I worked there each summer in college, and Zack was my boss two of those summers. He went on to become the potato salad guy. He also ended up spending time working on the same farm in France as my friend Natasha, who used to live at Ford Seven.

In college I made good friends with a certain Lauren. And while I was at the Fund, I worked with Ljubica, who now hosts Cold Pizza Party. Ljubica has collaborated with Street Fight Radio, and one of the hosts of that was Lauren's first boyfriend.

Reality TV

Katie, who I met through Lauren, worked at a dry cleaner's in high school. She used to let her friend Akashia sleep on the couch in the shop. Akashia went on to compete in the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race, but not before stealing from the cash register. I coincidentally gave Akashia a Tarot card reading once when I was in high school. A kid I was on the cross country team and in art class with went on to compete in Project Runway, and Katie's friend Irina ended up in the same writing program at Bard College as Christine.

Battles over fate

Some of history's greatest battles have been over the definition of the world and how best to interact with it. When people are particularly concerned with their fate as defined by an afterlife, they concern themselves with how best to attain a desirable position in it. This historically manifested in the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Thirty Years' War, and played a part in the earlier Crusades. Of course, there were agents who used religious conflict to negotiate and attain material wealth, power, and other assets outside the purview of a Christian afterlife. Still, the fact that religion served as such a notable vehicle to those ends speaks to the orientation of societies at those times.

As society came to focus more on outcomes in people's lives—in contrast to their afterlives—we see greater focus on questions of how best to organize and run society, such as in the Renaissance, Enlightenment and later movements. I believe this change in orientation came about as a result of improvements to productivity, increases in quality of life, accumulation of wealth (including such simple things as surplus food), disposable time and other factors that facilitate education, related investments, reflection, and innovation. Once typical people were freed (or relative freer on average) from the time and mental demands of a subsistence lifestyle and this development went noted by aristocrats, society came to focus more on ends and means in this life.

The trend has continued as we've redefined our locus of control from faith to the political system and beyond. We've redefined what it is to be human—this tying into the history of race in the US and other countries. We've redefined what it means to be a citizen, a decent person, a successful person, etc. Many of these redefinitions have resulted in the enfranchisement of more people. Think of the waves of feminism: the first priority was equal legal rights and the later priority became equal social and professional opportunities. These developments have broadly coincided with great global productivity, wealth, and leisure time. Today a lot of rhetoric is focused on the level of individual interactions. Is it acceptable to employ aggression to dominate and control interactions and their outcome? What about prejudice and other heuristics that reinforce problematic historical patterns? How much should one benefit from being born into a well-connected family or other windfalls? Our lot, or at least how we perceive it, is no longer so much a function of how devout we are. Nor are we entirely concerned with the influence of legal and political protocols. We're identifying levers of the world and our lives in more granular, less formal interactions and patterns.

Conquering the conquerors

I've noticed a pattern in history of the conquered becoming the conqueror. I can think of several manifestations. The first is Rome and the Germanic tribes that harried its frontier. In time these tribes would take Rome's place but carry its torch. This is what happened with the Franks in France, retaining the language and many of the institutions of Rome, as well as what would happen in the general area of modern day Germany, in the form of the Holy Roman Empire.

The two other outstanding cases that occur to me carry us across Eurasia. During the Islamic conquests, it was Arab power structures that subsumed and converted Persians. In time, however, Persians came to dominate the power structure, in the administration of the Abbasid Caliphate. In turn, those ethnicities then on the periphery - nomadic Turks and Mongols - would go from populations encroached on or pushed back to the new rulers of extensive, urbanized domains. This brings us to China, where the Mongols established the Yuan dynasty, ruling over their former suzerain for a hundred years.

Could there be something fundamental to these three examples? It only makes sense that in time the wealth accumulated in a society would become the prize of a new contingent of people. It might not be a meaningful abstraction that I've presented at all. For instance, wealth and power were changing hands among groups within Rome. Is that really any different from it passing into the hands of, say, the Lombards? At the same time, there are many distinct groups that have never "conquered their conquerors."

Some thoughts and language on thought and language

I don't think in English. Sometimes I think in Russian. Sometimes I think in images or something like a scene from a movie where many non-verbal aspects of a situation develop and play out. My thoughts used to be more closely coupled to their representation in spoken English, particularly early on in college, where my main mode of digesting information and expressing myself had become the word. This was in contrast to how I'd spent much of my free time in high school -- drawing for hours. And later in college I would focus more heavily on a different symbolic system - mathematical notation - as I undertook more coursework in statistics and econometrics. The cumulative effect of these experiences has left me with thoughts that aren't dominated by any particular medium. Sometimes I'm rehearsing a conversation in my head. At other times, I'm thinking in a sort of raw mode of concepts themselves, without their being tied to their corresponding word in English or Russian, or I might be visualizing shapes interacting with each other in a kind of space, such as when working with a matrix of data for work.

Now I don't overestimate how unique this is. It's often a matter of degree. That said, I have encountered multiple instances where others describe their cognition in contrast to mine. A parallel can be drawn in the different ways people read. Many people subvocalize when they read, registering minute movements of the physical pronunciation of words as their eyes pass over them, perhaps hearing the words in their heads. An alternative mode of reading doesn't involve subvocalization, and can become a largely visual experience. This likely typifies the reading experience for those who've learned only the written form of a language. Think scholars who've learned enough of a language only to use written sources in their work, or who are working with a dead language, the spoken form of which is no longer known.

A number of these concepts are explored in The Arrival, a movie that left a strong impression on me: the mapping of spoken to visually-represented language, how the mode of thinking dictates what is even possible to think. We benefit from a long history of packaging up concepts into a shorthand representation. There was a time when we didn't have the means to represent or conceive of numbers. Imagine how greatly extended our ability to manipulate our worlds - internal and external - has become. If I'm recalling a documentary I once saw accurately, and if it was accurate itself, Einstein expressed that one of the greatest challenges in his work as a physicist was finding the means to capture what he'd already conceptualized. This leads me to believe that for all its expressive capacity, dealing solely with language as we've inherited it can keep us from expanding the realms of personal - or more generally, human - insight. I wonder what future developments in language will afford us.

Role-playing games and the Republic of Georgia

I embarked on a mission today to find a t-shirt shop I'd heard rumor of recently. I couldn't find its exact location from the web so I figured I'd wander around until I stumbled onto it. A friend compared this approach to the gameplay in an RPG, where you can operate pretty aimlessly, prompting locals for information that can help you in your quest. It's an apt comparison, and it's become an increasingly rare mode of experiencing a place, but that's how I've typically travelled.

A trip that stands out along those lines was the one I took to the Caucasus with my friend Anjali. We were living in Ukraine at the time and were both well-traveled and opted for no preparation other than our roundtrip tickets to Tbilisi. We mostly memorized the Georgian alphabet on the flight, dozed off some, and arrived in the early morning. We had no map and nowhere to stay so we made our way downtown and to the train station, thinking we'd be able to find an affordable hotel or a babushka offering a room for rent. The hotels turned out to be too expensive - a couple hundred dollars a night if I recall correctly, or about as much money as I had to my name at the time. The clerk assured us the rooms were "very nice." The train station was notedly absent of nice old ladies offering shelter, in contrast to our experiences in other formerly Soviet republics. The city at this time was host to a disruptive anti-NATO protest, so that may have had something to do with it.

By this point it had started raining, and Anjali had placed a scarf over her head. Our search for shelter was taking on a certain Mary and Joseph quality, as we asked a woman sweeping her doorstep if she knew of a nearby internet cafe. She gave us directions as she placed a hand on Anjali and offered a sympathetic smile. Now, the internet proved to be an information desert for basic housing in Tbilisi, except for one forum post that contained the building number of a couple who offered rooms to travelers. We set out for it, though we didn't have an apartment number, so I resolved to just start knocking on doors. A woman answered the first door I tried. I apologized for bothering her and explained what we'd read, and it turned out it was her and her husband who were running this hostel of sorts. They invited us into their apartment, which I remember as open and bright, with Judaica, and explained they were already housing a group of Swedes who'd come to the area for mountain climbing. They were, however, able to ask their neighbors to house us. Fortunately those neighbors - a family of artists and musicians - were able to take us in.

It turned out to be a great experience. The walls were covered with paintings - many of family members. The mother worked restoring art at the local museum, and in our downtime we'd hear the father listening to opera or the daughter practicing violin. The grandmother told us about the city and where to find what. She also recounted to us that before Georgia's civil war in the 90s different ethnicities and faiths had gotten on harmoniously. It was a particularly poignant observation since at the time Russian forces were passing through parts of the country, as part of Abkhazia and South Ossetia's effort to break away from Georgia.

Hank Paulson, the financial crisis, and remaining fault lines

I just finished watching the documentary Hank: 5 Years from the Brink and got motivated to flesh out my understanding of the 2008 financial crisis again. The film was largely focused on the response to the crisis, but I thought it interesting that the makers didn't highlight the increase in the interest rate undertaken by the Fed not long before the economy started crumbling. In keeping with typical operations of the Fed, that sort of rate hike would have been in response to a sense that the economy was overheating - in or entering a bubble - and needed to be reeled in before it got too carried away. At that point the rate had been low for years - an enduring response to the bursting of the Dotcom bubble - which fueled the housing boom.

In retrospect we can easily say that it would have been more appropriate had the Fed raised rates much sooner. That gets us into considerations of ego and other interests in Fed operations. Fed chairmen want to reign over a flourishing economy, as do other officials who have influence on them, not least the President. Even the desire to see one's own investments perform well constitutes a conflict of interest. I've actually never seen anyone speak to that, as though Washington decision-makers should be rich enough that their own financial livelihoods wouldn't enter into play in open market operations. It's this fallible discipline and at least potential conflict of interest that lends support to arguments for abolishing the Fed. At the same time, the cause of the crisis was multifactorial. A big issue in responding appropriately to any situation is information, and the way in which subprime mortgages were securitized made it difficult to divine the actual circumstances we faced.

The multifactorial nature of the crisis is covered well in Fault Lines, a book by Raghuram G. Rajan, a former IMF economist. He goes into the distortions in the financial industry, where banks are (still) too big to fail, and the incentives lopsided. Failure goes unpunished, not just at the level of the market, where institutions have been propped up, but within those institutions as well. However, success is, particularly at the higher levels, exorbitantly rewarded. At the same time, Rajan goes into other aspects of the financial system that predispose it to crisis. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, complicit in the crisis, are a response to a society with a weak social safety net where that's been compensated for in one of the only political viable ways: promotion of often unsustainable private home ownership. He also points to global aspects, notably the high savings right in China that translated to global capital looking for a place to nest with good returns, such as subprime mortgage-backed investments.

By the end of the documentary, former treasury secretary Hank Paulson asserts that eventually we'll have another financial crisis - this is the nature of markets - but that we now have better mechanisms in place to mitigate the effects. He points to higher capital requirements and Dodd-Frank. The former no doubt cushions the system from calamity but the latter has been described by The Economist as a convoluted piece of legislation -- over a thousand pages long. In keeping with that observation my impression is that it's introduced complexity and hasn't actually made the work of regulators easier or more empowered. That, the historically low interest rates we've had for approaching a decade, and the fact that the banks that were too big to fail are now only bigger fill me with concern. I wouldn't be surprised if the next turn of the market exhibits the same severity of effects as the last crisis. In examining the historical frequency and severity of financial crises, Elizabeth Warren has made a strong argument that the now expired Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking, played a critical role in staving off disaster. Reinstating that sort of legislation is one of the only options I see available for minimizing the risk of cataclysmic crises in the future.

Consciousness as I know it

Two books I've read that deal more directly with the nature of the mind have stuck with me over the years. I wish I could say that a great deal of their content has stuck with me too, but in actuality just a few ideas.

The first - and one of my all-time favorite books - is Gödel, Escher, Bach. This was the first exposure I had to concepts like isomorphism and recursion. As it relates to the human mind however, what made the strongest impression on me was the idea that an essentially programmatic system could become so complex it could eventually refer to itself and even program itself. In that way, from the smallest biological building blocks we could eventually end up with consciousness and ostensibly free will.

The second was Consciousness Explained. What I retained from that one was the "multiple drafts" model of thinking. As I understand, it purports that at any given moment we have a shifting, incomplete impression of the world and ourselves. This is in keeping with the brain as a distributed network and in contrast to the outdated idea of dualism and the ghost in the machine. There is no central point where the experience of say, a color, is complete. Rather, we are more or less conscious of stimuli as their effects cascade across the brain.

This view of the mind rooted in materialism - that the brain is the mind - has me recalling the tendency to speak of the mind as though it exists independently of biology or the physical world. Just the other night a friend and I were discussing what someone would experience if they'd never been exposed to external stimuli. Biological considerations weren't the first thing to come to mind. It's as though we're wired to think we can transcend the material world. In a way, that's true. Neuroplasticity shows us thought can lead to physical change. While our minds may ultimately have a physical basis, we can overcome thoughts and behaviors and the particular physical states they represent.

I forgot the job market.

It took me a long time to understand any significant part of the labor market, particularly the nature of its demand. When I was graduating college, I didn't really have a sense of what employers were looking for, and that complicated my career path.

I had thought that for someone with my qualifications - a strong academic and extracurricular background and some work experience - there would be at least a couple straightforward paths. This was pre-crisis 2007, so in theory I should have been golden. When I began diving into job posts, however, I saw that employers were looking for skills I didn't have, hadn't considered, or hadn't even heard of: knowledge of Oracle, financial products, a programming language. I hadn't tailored my education to what actually had currency in the market. I had naively assumed my economics program would prepare me for a career . . . in economics.

To be fair, I think Ohio State's economics program did a good job of preparing me to pursue a higher degree, but I wasn't planning on that. It also endowed me with some knowledge and skills that would eventually prove very useful, but only after I'd gotten my foot in the door by combining that base with other qualifications that I'd accrued along a less cohesive and more incremental career path.

My advice for young people as they undertake decisions around their career and education is to look at job openings - particularly the requirements - throughout, not because you're looking for a job in that moment, but for the sake of understanding what you can do when you are, and how to line yourself up for it.

If I were to do it again, I would take some formal classes in the more applied stuff I've picked from work and on my own: courses in business, computer science, or engineering. And in keeping with my own advice, browsing job posts on Craigslist would help me keep in touch with movements in the market.

The Connection between Helter Skelter and ISIS

I had dinner with my neighbors a few days ago, and we somehow got to talking about this. One of them had grown up in the '60s and recalled that the scariest public event for her then was JFK's assassination. But things reached a new level of horror with the cult events that occupied the public eye of the '70s: Jonestown, the Manson Family, etc.

Jonestown was the largest single loss of American civilian lives until 9/11. Nine hundred and thirteen individuals lost their lives in a mass suicide/murder, the origin of the saying "drink the Kool-Aid," referring to the unquestioning acceptance of group norms. It's not difficult to imagine that this, along with the aftermath of the Manson murders, had a traumatizing effect on the public's psyche.

Some 40 years later, and I find myself wondering what's behind a phenomenon like ISIS. I'm sure there's a great body of sociological research that could shed some light on the question, but in our armchair capacity, my neighbor and I speculate that the instability of the '60s was the impetus for many of the curiosities that point forward. And the destabilizing effects of rapid globalization, not least of all the War in Iraq and other conflicts, have similarly given rise to the likes of ISIS.

The Civil Rights Movement and the response to the Vietnam War broke the status quo. That translated to a lot of progress, but there's also another side to it. The questioning required to make progress also left a lot of otherwise healthy individuals lost as myriad unexplored avenues and lifestyles were opening up. More nefarious actors were able to take advantage of individuals in that state.

If not war-torn Syria or Iraq, ISIS recruits comprise marginalized or disillusioned individuals from other parts of the world. They're in search of meaning and structure in their lives, and in a similar fashion, are finding it among homicidal radicals.

Ecology & Geology: The world is my lab, the world is my oyster

I've been taking a closer look at different scientific fields recently. I'm trying to develop a better sense of how they differ from each other. I think the layman often thinks of scientific research in a generic sense, not really appreciating how techniques and lifestyle vary across fields. This was (and probably still is) me. But I think even professional researchers are often so involved in their own work that they don't develop a sense of how things differ in other contexts.

Today I was delving into the world of practicing ecologists. It doesn't exactly come as a surprise that they appear to place particular value on freedom, mobility and working outside. This impression comes primarily from the ecology subreddit. Among the commenters we have:

• An environmental consultant who works on wetland delineations, threatened and endangered species surveys, habitat assessments, etc.
• A postdoc who's following up two weeks of field work with two years of computer work and who values the outdoor lifestyle, creativity and mobility afforded to those with an MS in biology or ecology
• An arborist who spends a lot of time climbing trees and describes it as the "best job ever"

This probably has something to do with natural environments serving as the ecologist's "lab". That stands in contrast to fields like biology, chemistry and physics, where more happens in a controlled environment. In that regard ecology reminds me of geology, which may be even more extreme when it comes to travel and working outdoors. It doesn't seem uncommon for geologists to spend a lot of time in the field searching for natural experiments and observing them. Geologists also appear to conduct some pretty sophisticated operations with heavy duty equipment, such as collecting cores and the like, which would make extensive field research that much more imperative.

Gaza and Israel, Russia and Ukraine: Illustrations of Risk-Eliminating Psychology

I often encounter blanket attitudes toward whole groups of people. Yesterday I was struck by a couple examples from an NPR article covering shifting attitudes of Israelis and Palestinians toward each other:

• An Israeli to a Palestinian: "Go away you trash. I would bury you in Gaza."
• A Palestinian: "Israeli Jews are bad human beings. They kill every day."

How could it be all members of an ethnicity are bad human beings, or deserve to be buried? People will argue the accuracy of their gross generalizations. Underneath their arguments, however, there's something actually worth considering: the psychology of group politics.

A number of studies have touched on the connection between neurology and political convictions. I've seen them best summarized here, but these ideas have popped up across popular media over the past couple years. Some notable conclusions are:

• Reliance on quick, efficient, and "low effort" thought processes yields conservative ideologies, while effortful and deliberate reasoning yields liberal ideologies.
• Liberals have more tolerance to uncertainty (bigger anterior cingulate cortex), and conservatives have more sensitivity to fear (bigger right amygdala).
• Republicans are more likely than Democrats to interpret faces as threatening and expressing dominant emotions, while Democrats show greater emotional distress and lower life satisfaction.
• Conservatism is focused on preventing negative outcomes, while liberalism is focused on advancing positive outcomes.
• Conservatives tend to have a stronger reaction to threatening noises and images than liberals.

The overarching theme is that the attitudes we associate with conservatism tend to arise more from fear than liberal attitudes do. Or, to invert the chicken and egg, fear lends itself to conservative thinking. That holds true in the literal sense of the word "conservative." Fear drives us to conserve our positions, to seek to eliminate risk.

This risk aversion is what's behind the overgeneralizing rhetoric around Gaza and Israel, Russia and Ukraine, and anytime and anywhere large scale conflict occurs. When someone says, "All these people are bad," I believe their brain has actually decided, "Some of these people might not be bad, but I associate enough risk with their group identity that I will act as though they all pose a threat to me."

If people were capable of expressing themselves in those terms, that latter sort of statement would allow for an honest conversation. It would allow for discussing whether that sort of risk-minimizing behavior is practical and ethical, instead of arguing over which ethnicities are good and which are evil.

Losing Face & Communicating Effectively

I'm starting to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to be a good communicator. To my mind I've practiced a few key skills for a long time - providing and seeking out feedback, expressing my plans and information to other parties in various ways, eliciting their plans, etc. - but at times I now think I missed the forest for the trees.

The key to good communication is not just observing best practices. That's certainly part of it and a good start. Without an explicit understanding of the overarching goal, however, those habits quickly descend into mindless process, so ritualistic in nature it cannot be intelligently applied to the unique circumstances of different situations.

To excel beyond that one must keep in mind that the ultimate point of communication is to ensure that all parties concerned have the same understanding of a particular topic. At the material level this is an isomorphic mapping of the most important features of the topic among the neurons of all involved. This is literally what the phrase "on the same page" means.

For a long time I thought it was sufficient to do my part to make mutual understanding merely possible. After that, the onus fell on the other parties involved. In some situations this is still appropriate. Excellent communication, however, requires that one go beyond that. In that regard, communication becomes much like more involved forms of education, where you ensure that your audience has retained the information you've presented to them. The sort of hands-off approach typical of laissez faire, college-level education isn't appropriate here. If someone has difficulty understanding the material, the responsibility to identify that difficulty and clarify the material falls with the instructor. As a result, effective communication should focus more on multimedia, take advantage of different learning styles, and more actively seek confirmation of understanding than the conventional course lecture.

There was one other thing that historically held me back from becoming a better communicator. That was my aversion to asking questions. Questions at some point in my mind had become the tool of those unable to pick something up the first time. I now see that I was wrong to be so absolutist in my attitude. Questions reinforce mutual understanding, serve as a mechanism for confirming it, and - to those adept at communication - illustrate intelligence and skill. If you're concerned about those who value sharpness as I did, making clear that you're asking questions to ensure mutual understanding can win you their esteem.

To the extent one reaches out to their audience and is willing to potentially lose face as a communicator, there is a certain selflessness in exercising communication skills. One might even think of it as a trade off between short-term and long-term gain. By taking the effort to establish upfront the certainty of details among all parties involved, one can avert costly mistakes and adjustments in the future.

Recreating Society & Organizational Behavior

Thanks to shows like Doomsday Preppers, the recent Mayan calendar scare and the general apocalyptic malaise of the post-financial crisis world, I've recently taken an interest in the end of the world and what it would be like to rebuild society.

Survival guides and a few reality TV shows (including my favorite, The Colony) already show us what we'd need to survive an initial catastrophe, but I'm more interested in what comes next. What would it take to approach what we have today and what improvements, if any, could we make?

A society is by definition more than one person, so you'll need some help along the way. Naturally, the first thing my mind turned to was group dynamics. After you've secured your basic needs - and even during it unless you're going solo - a certain set of norms for group behavior must be established and serve as a foundation going forward.

Security

First and foremost you need to be sure that those in your immediate vicinity won't materially harm you. That requires one of the following:

• Physical separation from threatful individuals and groups
• An established history of peaceful coexistence or cooperation
• Some other reassurance that someone means or poses no harm. This could take the form of a larger population on your side, rendering individual outsiders or groups of outsiders innocuous, or some notional reassurance, such as strictly observed symbolic codes (think truce flag).

Trust

This largely overlaps with security, but I feel that the word more extensively alludes to emotional and informational aspects. Trust is the concept that not only will someone refrain from materially harming you, but also that they are as they represent themselves to be and will maybe even help you in times of need.

Accountability

What will keep someone in my community from riding on the coattails of others? We've historically remedied freeriding and collective responsibility in a couple of ways. One is community-based, in which a population is small enough to collectively understand how much any given individual puts into and gets out of the system. This allows a community to decide who can manage what according to their known circumstances. Perhaps a seemingly capable person would get a lot of flak for skimping on their investment in their community, but we wouldn't expect the same for infants and we'd expect compassion to come into play for elderly or sickly individuals. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell suggests the number at which this solution breaks down is 150 individuals.

After it is no longer feasible to effectively track who gets what they give by means of relationships and gossip alone, we've managed by implementing my formal systems: central governments and courts for enforcing property rights, credit scores and background checks for establishing reputation, etc.

Humans have an innate sense of fairness that they seek to realize whether through soft means, such as peer pressure and retaliation, or through a more officially-recognized vehicle. In the context of our scenario, accountability will come naturally to a certain scale as individuals specialize and recover a previous standard of living. Obtaining it will then require more sophisticated technology or forms of organization.


The above characteristics are interrelated and by no means an exhaustive list. However, it has got me thinking about what it takes to make any team - in a survival scenario or not - to function effectively. It also seems that a key to instilling relationships of this nature is some sort of central identity, suggesting that tribalism, by necessity, is deeply rooted into what it means to be human.

The Existential Order of the Internet

Real estate on the internet is primarily defined by its content. More so than for physical locations, which are bound to their proximity to other things and consequently more heavily influenced by their context, what matters most for websites is what they contain. Because the elements of the web are free-floating, and because the infrastructure exists to so easily facilitate it, human agents on the web break down into a few fundamental categories based on how they interact with content.

Consumers

This is the most passive of the categories. Spend most of your time online watching Netflix on your iPad, browsing your Facebook feed or catching up on headlines? Then this is probably you.

The level of passivity each role exhibits diminishes as you ascend the pyramid. As for many material products, consumers tend to outnumber suppliers and producers on the internet too. Of course, how passive you are depends on the category of content we're talking about. But in the aggregate, you'll measure up differently compared to others, just as in the broader picture people can be closer to net producers or net consumers.

Disseminators

You can be an exclusive consumer, but except in the case of distributing content you've never even fleetingly examined, disseminators are consumers too. The crucial difference is that in addition to internalizing content themselves, they pass it along to others. You're a disseminator if you regularly share memes or repost your finds to Tumblr, Pinterest or a similar service.

Disseminators are similar to the Connectors and Mavens of The Tipping Point. More accurately, they don't just spam communities but have the sense to know what others will find appealing or, on occasion, viral. If no one reads your second-hand content, you're really just a consumer.

Originators

This hierarchy can really apply to any creative production. Originators are the inventors and designers that produce new archetypes in the struggle for prominence. In the context of this article, they are the bloggers, vloggers, more legit personages and online artists.

This is the apex of internet existence, one in which you no longer constitute a spectator but play an active part in the construction of the digital world. It's the end that ambitious fans of any trade - digital or otherwise - aspire to, myself included.

A fourth category

Although this isn't incorporated into my model, a fourth (and maybe fifth) category of Disrupters/Destroyers could be reserved for malicious hackers and for those edge cases when more typical users dismantle content.

Exclusively "X"

In practice most people belong to each category, but some more than others. However, as alluded to above, it is technically possible to belong exclusively to one category. Consumers most easily of all. The exclusive Originator is an anomaly and perhaps a mad genius - a hermit who has no uptake from the external world but can project his vision into it.

I don't think a hermit's approach makes for a very good originator though. In my opinion, it's usually familiarity with a wide range of topics and their recombination that make the most interesting content. Just as in Maslow's hierarchy of needs it's possible for a starving artist to engage in the pursuit of his or her passions to the exclusion of physical needs, but most people operate on more than one level and for good reason.

Privacy, Accountability and Sustainability

Big names, big changes

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the future is one in which people relinquish more and more privacy. With the successive changes that Facebook has implemented and its virtual monopoly over personal networks, he's gradually succeeding in making that a reality. One of the initial groundbreaking aspects of Facebook was its convention of displaying users' real names, as opposed to the fabricated usernames of more anonymous contemporaries, such as AIM and MySpace. That sparked the gradual process of deprivatization that today has culminated in the Timeline feature, which makes Facebook actions - particularly historical activity - more visible than ever before.

Zuckerberg isn't alone in his campaign to open up our online lives. Google's new privacy policy now permits greater sharing of private data across its network of companies.

Encouraging the greater disclosure of private information certainly makes sense for Facebook, Google and other businesses. They're no doubt looking for better indicators of individual preference, in order to make their ad services easier to customize, more effective and more appealing to advertisers.

There are also benefits to reap from the network effects of having more information visible. Tracking and broadcasting users' actions across a site generates more content and makes users more invested. It was the feature I recall as most controversial - News Feed - that transformed Facebook from a social networking utility into an entertainment destination. New features aim to similarly increase the amount of time users are on the site.

One big murder mystery

But what does online privacy have to do with sustainability? One of the obstacles to sustainability - and to any undertaking in a large society generally - is establishing accountability. In a complex, dynamic society such as ours, the volume of actors and interactions enables anonymity, which can undermine accountability.

To understand how anonymity can degrade accountability, destroy trust in society and pose challenges to it, you need only look to con artists. It's the ability to travel to untainted markets that allows the snake oil salesman to continue peddling wares that fail to deliver. If would-be victims could consult Yelp or some other fair assessment of the product or salesman, he would soon be unable to profit from fraud.

Along those same lines, The Economist recently presented a strong argument for why limited liability status shouldn't enjoy anonymity. Among other things, the combination permits entrepreneurs with a record of failures to conceal their past and, quite possibly, their incompetence, and makes lenders generally less willing to lend.

How do I know I can trust you?

Anonymity wasn't a problem in early societies and still isn't in sufficiently small or close-knit ones. Where communities are too big, mobile or loose to base trust on personal experience or communal knowledge, we have had to address the problem of anonymity by establishing alternative measures of reputation: brands, credit ratings, permits, certifications, criminal registries and other signals. In place of direct or second-hand experience, the solution has been to use technology to establish transparency. If current trends in privacy continue, we'll be able to do that much more effectively in the future.

As regards sustainability, the challenge has been in establishing what damages have been inflicted on the environment by whom. One part of this dilemma can be solved through science, by more accurately defining the health implications of a practice or substance. The other must be redressed by linking agents to the often nebulous environmental repercussions of their actions. The environment suffers because of the tragedy of the commons and the only way to resolve it is to establish a clear connection between individual actions and outcomes.

The above examples illustrate the trade-off between privacy and accountability, but it can permeate any sector of life. How can I assess performance if decisions are largely closed-door deals? How can I know whose interests a politician represents if he's funded through a faceless super PAC? And how can I know whether an employee or my kid's teacher is suited for the job if I cannot review and corroborate their past? In spite of these doubts, full transparency is not always desirable.

Challenges to transparency

Even though greater openness can minimize risk and deter crime, there are also justified reasons to oppose it. If you're a law-abiding citizen who doesn't conform to popular norms - if you're a minority in some way - that may be reason enough to advocate privacy rights.

Those reasons become further warranted when transparency is implemented asymmetrically. Imagine a case where potential victims of oppression or exploitation have the details of their lives open to scrutiny while the identities and doings of their oppressors remain unknown. This already happens. Intelligence agencies and secret police in authoritarian regimes are able to uphold the status quo partly because they exist in shadow, inoculating their members against individual culpability.

An Afghan officer using anonymity to her advantage.

The prospect of change and the imperative to forgive

Perhaps the most compelling reason to resist the dismantling of privacy, however, is its implications for the capacity to change one's life. Transparency already limits opportunities for ex-cons, which serves at least theoretically as a deterrent to would-be criminals, but consider apparent law-abiding citizens or victims of circumstance.

In The Road to Serfdom, economist Friedrich Hayek argues that one of the most crippling aspects of living in a communist society for both the individual and the economy is the lack of prospects, the virtual inability to alter one's position. Could extensive transparency in a free market democracy similarly limit the capacity for self-reinvention and sentence individuals to their fates earlier in life? It's a consideration that forces one to wonder at which point we're best equipped to make decisions and whether weighing earlier ones will make our lives more a function of our initial environments.

The need for feedback

There exists an optimal balance between privacy and accountability and it will hinge on delineating between what details are of import and which are not. Should it matter that I'm a Mormon? Should it matter what I download?

When it comes to material impact on resources, however, which is what public health and sustainability are fundamentally based on, I cannot conceive of an instance where that information should be kept secret. There's no justification for the Soviet Union delaying the news of the Chernobyl disaster or for private enterprise to underreport their resource use. Similarly, entities should get credit for improving quality of life where it is due.

I'm not a robot

But information on its own isn't enough. Many of us - including myself - often operate according to what's in our immediate interest, what we can get out of the system for ourselves with the least input, if at times at the expense of others. I shouldn't expect greater visibility on its own to compel people to act in the best long-term interests of what they hold dear.

At the same time, we often make decisions based on emotions and unexamined desire. I contend here, as I have before, that people are a social animal, willing to do that which will elevate their status in the eyes of those whose opinions they value. At that point, it's no longer about the environment as much as it is about sharing a common identity and showcasing accomplishments within that framework. I may not actually care about sustainability, but may care only about the approval of others who profess that they do. By necessity, there will also be circles that define themselves by being anti-environmental, regardless of whether they genuinely care.

In order to propagate the sustainability mentality then, it is necessary to establish it as an esteemed lifestyle and leverage humanity's social apparatus to encourage people to pursue it. Luckily, I don't think that behavior is founded exclusively on competition for social status. People are capable of reason as well and I believe it is this that will decide the conflict with those who define themselves in opposition to sustainability.

Data drowning

The issue remains of how best to convey information in a world drowning in data. Science and education can impart us with a sense of what's better for health and the environment, but the key will be conveying information in a conveniently digestible and meaningful packet.

That's been the aim of the new environmental rating system for cars, which permits comparisons across electric, hybrid and conventional models. The ranking is communicated according to a grade letter system that consumers are already familiar with.

I envision that products in the future will universally carry an assessment of their ecological footprint, in much the same way foods already display nutritional information. I also wouldn't be opposed to wearing some indicator of my sustainability on my sleeve. If that proves too much sensory overload, then perhaps in the same way technology is helping generate and disseminate data, it will one day improve our ability to process that information.

But don't rely on it. A few professions that you're overwhelmed by the complexities of today's world can easily double as an admission that you're not fit to make decisions in your own interest.

Why is my biodegradable floss packaged in petrochemicals?

It's probably not a question that plagues you late at night but the short answer is the US government. A few weeks ago I wrote about my floss of choice. It's made of silk, which makes it nontoxic, renewable and biodegradable. That rose the question of why its so seemingly eco-minded manufacturers would package it in a plastic cartridge, so I shot off an email to Radius and here's their response:

The FDA considers floss a medical device and because of that they require anything that is sold in drug stores to be packaged in a plastic container. Since our products are sold in both drug stores and natural product stores we must abide by that law. We have considered creating alternative packaging for the natural product industry but since we also sell in drug stores we cannot have an entire cardboard container until the laws are changed.

I guess plastic packaging is one way to keep things sterile. And if it's plant-derived plastic that'll get shuffled into an indefinite recycling loop, then there's nothing technically keeping it from being zero-impact. But most plastics are still petroleum-derived, with Coke's PlantBottle as one highly visible (and recent) exception.

Is plastic really protecting me from my floss? It certainly can't be the first time the FDA's been off the mark. The typical tale is that regulations impede entrepreneurship yet are instrumental in protecting public health. I wonder to what extent regulation is impeding ecological sustainability.

Cities for People and the Planet

In light of my recent post on green building projects in Italy, I've decided to highlight here a couple more videos on sustainable urban planning from TED.

First up is a talk by Ellen Dunham-Jones on how we can modify existing infrastructure to accommodate changing tastes and needs.

What I appreciate most about this presentation is its focus on working with what we already have, as opposed to uprooting suburban environments to build from scratch. That way we can address the challenge of sustainability without incurring superfluous costs. The goal is to minimize the inputs needed to reduce further demand on resources.

It also happens that I've translated this talk into Russian. It has only yet to be reviewed and approved by another translator per TED's quality standards. Any takers so we can get it up there?

Next comes a more recent talk on the perceived trade-offs between sustainability and quality of life. Bjarke Ingels helps break this false dichotomy by presenting on a series of projects that both benefit the environment and give people more opportunities to indulge.