thinkfetti

David Weinberger, in his blog, has just posted about a new patent related to faceted navigation (see my earlier post for my initial wishlist). I’m curious to see if/when this trickles down to a publicly available tool.

Choice complicates the decision-making process (that’s pretty close to tautological on one hand, but it’s not so cut-and-dried as it first seems: some constraints lead to more efficient progress to an “end,” but when there are too many constraints, the “end” might be in the wrong spot), but choice is also empowering (if also effort- and time-consuming). I would imagine the “optimal” amount of choice for efficient - and effective - navigation of solution space is going to turn out to be context-sensitive both locally and globally.

I’m sorry for writing on such an abstract level (fleshing this out in writing with concrete examples will have to wait until I have more time available), but I’ve just finished reading Duncan Watt’s Six Degrees, a primer on network science, and as a result, I’m seeing evidence of networks everywhere.

Our lives are not, to borrow from the language of physics, lived in “conservative fields.”

This is not a physics classroom, but I’d like you to understand my metaphor. The presence of a conservative field means there is a quantity that depends on where you are, but not how you got there. For example, the energy stored in a slingshot’s rubber strap depends on how far the strap is stretched. If it’s stretched 25 cm, it has a certain amount of energy that can be used to accelerate the slingshot’s projectile. If you stretch and unstretch and stretch the slingshot again and then pause at the point when the strap is stretched 25 cm, it will still have the same amount of available energy. If you very, very gradually stretch the strap, over a period of hours even, by the time you stop stretching at a total stretch of 25 cm, again the energy stored up will be the same.

If our lives were lived in a conservative field, where/what we are now would make all the difference, regardless of what paths we created or followed to get here. More than saying “the end justifies the means,” we would be in the strange situation of having the means not “mean” anything whatsoever.

This thought becomes intolerable when we think about the ends of our lives, because if all that mattered were where we were, what of all this living that happens in between our births and deaths?

Here is an Allen Ginsberg poem, which I’m quoting from his Illuminated Poems (with art by Eric Drooker — and please buy the book to support great, important books like it):

In Death, Cannot Reach What I Most Near

We know all about death that
we will ever know because
we have all experienced
the state before birth.
Life seems a passage between
two doors to the darkness.
Both are the same and truly
eternal, and perhaps it may
be said that we meet in
darkness. The nature of time
is illuminated by this
meeting of eternal ends.

It is amazing to think that
thought and personality
of man is perpetuated in
time after his passage
to eternity. And one time
is all Time if you look
at it out of the grave.

My wife and I are very, very lucky to still have our parents with us. It is very hard to see any of them uncomfortable or suffering, and we know that although sometimes all we can do is offer moral support, and share the burdens that come with being granted a life, that offering and sharing does matter.

The how of living is everything, as far as I can tell.

A subtitle for this post might be: “on saying ‘no’.”

In the last month, I have said “no” more often than I ever have since I was two years old. One difference between now and then is that when I was two, I imagine my “no” frequency probably owed a lot to having recently learned that “no” is a power word — a word that apparently contains much more influence than the mere sounds or ideological content associated with it. “No” makes a difference. “No” is a declaration of individual relevance.

Now, the reason I’ve been saying “no” so frequently is that I’m a department chair. More specifically, as a department, we (and also as an individual, I) have come up with some goals for how student registration should be treated so as to distribute teaching loads among our faculty. Part of the idea is that if students unable to enroll in their first choices for courses are channelled to courses that will satisfy their needs as far as graduation requirements, our faculty may have balanced teaching loads (within a factor of two or so). So when students not getting their first choices have been coming to see me, part of my responses to them has frequently been to say “no.”

“No” isn’t the end of my interaction with them, though. I try to find out what they’re trying to accomplish. In almost all cases, I have been able to help or direct the student to an alternate way (an alternate course, with available seats) to satisfy their primary interest: making progress toward their undergraduate degree.

In a very few cases (usually medically-related or students planning to graduate at the end of the current semester), I have, after exhausting the alternatives I tried instead, authorized them to what we call “overrides” into the courses they were trying to enter. I’d say this was in about 5-7% of the cases.

So my “no” is not generally “no.” It has been “no, but….” followed by a (frequently successful) attempt to accommodate interests, rather than positions. (For a good summary on the difference, take a look at Fisher and Ury’s Getting to Yes) I’ve done a lot of problem solving and facilitating. And although my job can be very wearing (more on that later, when I write about the tragedy of the commons), I feel confident I have provided a service — both to the individual students and to the department I work in — by saying “no.”

There are many demonstrably smart people whose intelligence is overrated.

I’ve complained about “stupid smart people” for years: people with apparently “high IQ’s” (whatever IQ is — and measurements of general intelligence should be the subject for another rant) who are generally highly successful in their technical areas, but who are unable to relate well to people outside of their areas, who are skilled at employing logical reasoning but unable to operate in the region outside of logic where much of living happens.

We suffer greatly under experts. When we benefit from expertise (which we frequently do — I don’t contest that), the expert is usually a specialist in a narrow domain. The problem is when such a specialist believes (assumes?) his (why do I write ‘his’? Hmmm…) expertise transcends that narrow domain.

Expertism is the ill-placed confidence in experts who think their expertise extends beyond its actual boundaries. Hubris.

Sometimes, this ‘ill-placed confidence’ is placed by the experts onto themselves, and then it just rubs off on credulous people around them. You may be able to think of examples.

Lin Yutang, in The Importance of Living, has a little to say that puts the lie to these wayward experts:

[T]o proceed from the knowledge of books to the knowledge of life, mere thinking or cogitation is not enough; one has to feel one’s way about — to sense things as they are and to get a correct impression of the myriad things in human life and human nature not as unrelated parts, but as a whole.

In this matter of feeling about life and of gaining experience, all our senses cooperate, and it is through the cooperation of the senses, and of the heart with the head, that we can have intellectual warmth.

Intellectual warmth, after all, is the thing, for it is the sign of life, like the color of green in a plant. We detect life in one’s thought by its presence or absence of warmth, as we detect life in a half dried-up tree struggling after some unfortunate accident, by noting the greenness of its leaves and the moisture and healthy texture of its fiber. (139)

“Intellectual warmth” “Life in one’s thought” — I imagine there are many people who would consider such formulations besides the point, irrelevant, not worth regarding. I find them life-saving.

The numbers are terrifying.

I just finished my first real weekly review of my Getting Things Done setup, which I’m running on OmniOutliner Pro with the kGTD scripts. I’ve been doing GTD since December, but I’ve had a lot of time out of town, so up to this point, I had only done one moderately real weekly review.

The weekly review is, in large part, a survey of what projects I have going, and what things I have listed under “I’d maybe like to get to these someday.”

A project is pretty much anything that will take more than one step to accomplish, and anything I have listed here anywhere is something I couldn’t have taken care of, once and for all, in a couple minutes.

OK, then, the numbers…

• I have 23 next-items that are just single tasks, not part of any larger project.
• I have 27 projects on my someday/maybe list.
• And I have 144 projects going now (!!!), each with a next-action I’ve figured out to be the very next thing I need to do to make progress on the respective project. Remember, none of these next-actions is just a “few minutes” thing.

Geez! And some qualitative observations:

• Almost all of the 144 projects are things I’m doing for my job.
• Many, if not most, of the 27 projects being put off for now, on my someday/maybe list, are much more interesting to me than the lion’s share of the 144 projects on the live list.

Hence the title of this post. This is, however, very useful information for me - it’s quite impressive to be able to see this so blatantly available. Clearly, some changes are in order here!