I often talk about how experience is the most important thing ever for self-direction. To take it a little out of the realm of theory, I want to share a recent experience that I think will help me down the line.
Last Friday was supposed to be a pretty exciting day. Right after work I was going to be doing a huge bike ride, followed by a Blues dance at 8. Given the rest of the week being bad for various reasons, I was seriously looking forward to everything.
I got out of work and immediately biked over the meeting point. six of my other friends were there, and we set off with everybody else. Then, about ten minutes after we start, my front brake snaps. I immediately pull off the street and get down to fix it.
One problem: I don't know anything about bikes. I can change a tire and unjam a gear, but that's about it. I spend two hours staring and tinkering with the bike, trying to figure out what the heck is going on. To make matters worse the only tool I have is a wrench. Oh, and my false tooth falls out halfway through. That hurts a bit.
After finally working out how to fix the bike, I manage to get the brakes half working. I need special tools or two extra people in order to get them proper. It's already 8:00 now and I'm missing the dance. I try to find it, but because I'm far from the biking stop point I'm a little lost. I get more lost trying to find it, and by 8:30 I give up and bike back to the city.
Okay, so what does this have to do with experience? The lessons I'm learning from this are:
1) If you're not prepared everything can change from "awesome" to "terrible" in the span of a few seconds, and
2) How to fix a brake.
The second lesson is a little more immediately useful. Hey, it's a new skill. Friday was incredibly frustrating and stressful, but that's in the past now. If the same thing happens in the future, I'll be prepared to handle it. It's also now a lot more obvious to me that I need to know my bike inside and out, so that a similar problem doesn't floor me either.
The first lesson, though, is gonna take a little longer to internalize. I didn't even realize the brakes could snap like that. How do I prepare for the unknown? I think a better thing to take away is that even if things spiral out like this, it's always recoverable. It could take a few hours to get back on track, but at least I will get back on track, and I'll learn something out of it.
If you asked me before the ride "hey, do you want your brakes to snap and you learn how to fix them", I would say "hell no". If you asked me now "hey, do you want to have it so your brakes never snapped and you never learned how to fix them", I'd probably say "no" again, although I don't know how I'd handle the temptation. I think that's a really interesting comment on how we make choices: even if we know something is better for us in the long run, and we'll be glad it happened once its over, we'll still refuse to choose it.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Thursday, July 19, 2012
The Fallacy of the Self
Normally I hate meta posts, but I had a really good one I wanted to talk about. Last night I was trying to write on the idea of of intelligence. You know, what is intelligence actually, why our standard methods of measuring it are really lame, etc. I was stumped on actually defining intelligence, though. Now, I normally map out thoughts on my mirrors, using a whiteboard marker to scrawl ideas. Very quickly most of it was covered in bad analogies and failed ideas. In a fit of inspiration, I erased everything and wrote the following:
"Intelligence is the ability to see your specific knowledge as part of a whole. The most intelligent man in the world can watch a Shakespeare play and through that gain a deeper understanding of mathematics."
Looked about right to me. I admired the definition for a bit, and then in another fit of inspiration wrote the following under it:
"My perception of intelligence is contingent on my fallacies of thought, which are contingent on my desire for the world to have a certain form. I desire the world's form to be that the qualities I idolize are the ones that define intelligence. Therefore, my meditation was to validate my beliefs and not to develop them."
Which is a little troubling to say the least. Understatement of the month right there. I try to figure out what I should want, and I decide what I should want is what I already want. While I wrote it specifically about how to think about intelligence, it's actually a pretty general claim. Does being obsessed with self-improvement make it any more likely to happen, or is it just to convince myself that I don't have to change how I handle things? Let's take for example my post on sleep schedules. We have a specific thing I am trying to improve: better sleep. But does that make me a better person? Or do I just pretend it does it order to justify the energy sunk into it?
This may seem like a minor problem: does it matter why I do things if I do them anyway? Yes, for two reasons. First of all, I stopped the sleep schedule thing. I kept it in place for like a week before forgetting all about it. Maybe part of that was improper motives, the same way you're not going to study much if your only reason is "Mom said I should." So the second part of that question, "if I do them anyway", is a straw man. It does matter because I don't do them.
The second problem feels less important, but probably is significantly moreso. I have finite resources. I have to prioritize certain things over others. If I'm trying to justify changes over find them, then I'm prioritizing the "wrong" things. Like if I spent all my energy getting really good at badminton while ignoring my social ineptitude. That kind of thing. I once asked people for what I could do better and got some responses. Most of them I discounted as unimportant, unnecessary, or already had by me. Looking back, that was damn stupid of me. Really damn stupid.
This is what I'm calling The Fallacy of the Self. Existing in your own developmental world, what you should be doing and what you plan to do forever disconnected. It's an especially potent trap because introspection just gets you deeper- you're already in a state where you see your current path as the best path. Any option you take to escape the trap is coloured by the fact it was created while you were in the trap, which makes getting out a fairly difficult endeavor.
So how do we get out? The problem I run into is that, if this is true, anything I think of is going to be suspect. I want to say outside experience (as always) is the key, since it's the only way to leave your world. But is that really true, or do I just really want it to be true? I have no way of knowing that anything I say is going to be so horribly biased that it's useless or harmful.
Nonetheless, "I can't be sure I'm right, so I won't say anything" is a colossally stupid thing to say. So I'm sticking with my current solution: make sure you keep experiencing things and hope for the best. If any of you disagree, feel free to tear into me. Hell, even if you agree but want to disagree for the sake of it, do that too. If there's something out there that could change my mind, I want to know about it.
"Intelligence is the ability to see your specific knowledge as part of a whole. The most intelligent man in the world can watch a Shakespeare play and through that gain a deeper understanding of mathematics."
Looked about right to me. I admired the definition for a bit, and then in another fit of inspiration wrote the following under it:
"My perception of intelligence is contingent on my fallacies of thought, which are contingent on my desire for the world to have a certain form. I desire the world's form to be that the qualities I idolize are the ones that define intelligence. Therefore, my meditation was to validate my beliefs and not to develop them."
Which is a little troubling to say the least. Understatement of the month right there. I try to figure out what I should want, and I decide what I should want is what I already want. While I wrote it specifically about how to think about intelligence, it's actually a pretty general claim. Does being obsessed with self-improvement make it any more likely to happen, or is it just to convince myself that I don't have to change how I handle things? Let's take for example my post on sleep schedules. We have a specific thing I am trying to improve: better sleep. But does that make me a better person? Or do I just pretend it does it order to justify the energy sunk into it?
This may seem like a minor problem: does it matter why I do things if I do them anyway? Yes, for two reasons. First of all, I stopped the sleep schedule thing. I kept it in place for like a week before forgetting all about it. Maybe part of that was improper motives, the same way you're not going to study much if your only reason is "Mom said I should." So the second part of that question, "if I do them anyway", is a straw man. It does matter because I don't do them.
The second problem feels less important, but probably is significantly moreso. I have finite resources. I have to prioritize certain things over others. If I'm trying to justify changes over find them, then I'm prioritizing the "wrong" things. Like if I spent all my energy getting really good at badminton while ignoring my social ineptitude. That kind of thing. I once asked people for what I could do better and got some responses. Most of them I discounted as unimportant, unnecessary, or already had by me. Looking back, that was damn stupid of me. Really damn stupid.
This is what I'm calling The Fallacy of the Self. Existing in your own developmental world, what you should be doing and what you plan to do forever disconnected. It's an especially potent trap because introspection just gets you deeper- you're already in a state where you see your current path as the best path. Any option you take to escape the trap is coloured by the fact it was created while you were in the trap, which makes getting out a fairly difficult endeavor.
So how do we get out? The problem I run into is that, if this is true, anything I think of is going to be suspect. I want to say outside experience (as always) is the key, since it's the only way to leave your world. But is that really true, or do I just really want it to be true? I have no way of knowing that anything I say is going to be so horribly biased that it's useless or harmful.
Nonetheless, "I can't be sure I'm right, so I won't say anything" is a colossally stupid thing to say. So I'm sticking with my current solution: make sure you keep experiencing things and hope for the best. If any of you disagree, feel free to tear into me. Hell, even if you agree but want to disagree for the sake of it, do that too. If there's something out there that could change my mind, I want to know about it.
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