CEO & Founder at White Rabbit Express and Blackship.com
Max Hodges
Meditation skill: Surfing the Urge
Speaking to the larger issue you raise, yes, anyone who thinks we are purely rational creatures is deluding themselves:
. . . they failed to appreciate that the self illusion explains so many aspects of human behavior as well as our attitudes toward others. When we judge others, we consider them responsible for their actions. But was Mary Bale, the bank worker from Coventry who was caught on video dropping a cat into a garbage can, being true to her self? Or was Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant being himself or under the influence of someone else? What motivated Congressman Weiner to text naked pictures of himself to women he did not know? In the book, I consider some of the extremes of human behavior from mass murderers with brain tumors that may have made them kill, to rising politicians who self-destruct. By rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses, I think it is easier to understand why we suddenly go off the rails. It explains why we act, often unconsciously, in a way that is inconsistent with our self image – or the image of our self as we believe others see us.
That said, the self illusion is probably an inescapable experience we need for interacting with others and the world, and indeed we cannot readily abandon or ignore its influence, but we should be skeptical that each of us is the coherent, integrated entity we assume we are.ref:
not exactly. I’m fond of @ryleah’s contribution: “Emergence as a term doesn’t add a reason for a thing, but it does rule some out.”
How honest are you really being if you’re coming up with silly logical scenarios to avoid answering a question truthfully? I just don’t see the point of being “technically honest” when you don’t want to reveal something? The only people who say, “I can neither confirm nor deny such and such” is when they are on trial and have a right against self-incrimination—not when they are talking to their friends.
So this all seems silly and unnecessary. If you don’t want your friend to know what you did, just change the subject or lie about it. Or tell them, “I’d rather not talk about it.” Let’s say I stay up doing cocaine with a male prostitute all night, but I don’t want to reveal this to my friend. If I say, “either I did or I don’t want to tell you” now you’ve created some suspicion which could involve some unwanted attention or scrutiny into your affairs, such as pressing forward with follow-up questions, or unwanted office gossip about your late night activities.
FRIEND: Did you get to sleep early last night?
Just lie and cover up the reason why you’re really tired.“Yes, I went to bed early, but then woke up at 5AM and couldn’t get back to sleep.”
Deflect
“Sure, how about you? Or did you stay up watching binge watching Netflix again?”
Subject Change:
“Oh hey! Can we talk about that upcoming dinner party?” (they were just making small talk anyway, so swap to something more important.)
thought of you!
I think you’re missing the point. To say, “life emerges from the activities of cells” or that “intelligence emerges from non-intelligence” is not simply to make empty statements devoid of meaning. The first is an assertions that “life” isn’t a *thing* which one should seek to find somewhere, materially, in nature—like some yet-to-be-cataloged bird of paradise. It’s a property of complex cellular processes. There are people who think that brain contains a “core self,” as if it were a kind of organ. It might be so obvious to you that it’s not, that you find the word emergent here to be redundant. But to say that “the self, or intelligence, is an emergent property of our brain activity” is to make it clear that it emerges as a kind of byproduct and is not a specific *thing* or essence. There are other ideas about intelligence going around. Not everyone agrees or understands how intelligence can emerge from the activities of non-intelligent “agents” or resources. So the notion of “emergence”, while not explaining the details, can at least assert a stance on the matter.
So I don’t see these terms as totally meaningless (nor “fun”to strip out of our language.)
Hi, I’ve updated my post, toned it down, and added some new content. Hope that helps.
OK I’ve taken your advice. I toned it down and elaborated. Thanks
Unmitigated reductionism has had a detrimental effect on drug discovery and vaccine development
We simply can’t anticipate or compute some interactions and effects due to the sheer complexity of living organisms in thermodynamic interaction with their environment. For instance, the experience of pain can alter human behaviour, but the lower-level chemical reactions in the neurons that are involved in the perception of pain are not the cause of the altered behaviour, as the pain itself has causal efficacy. According to the principles of emergence, the natural world is divided into hierarchies that have evolved over evolutionary time (Kim, 1999; Morowitz, 2002). Reductionists advocate the idea of ‘upward causation’ by which molecular states bring about higher-level phenomena, whereas proponents of emergence accept ‘downward causation’ by which higher-level systems influence lower-level configurations (Kim, 1999).
Have a read:
Reductionism and complexity in molecular biology
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299179/
Some highlights
The constituents of a complex system interact in many ways, including negative feedback and feed-forward control, which lead to dynamic features that cannot be predicted satisfactorily by linear mathematical models that disregard cooperativity and non-additive effects...
An additional peculiarity of complex biological systems is that they are open—that is, they exchange matter and energy with their environment—and are therefore not in thermodynamic equilibrium...
In the past, the reductionist agenda of molecular biologists has made them turn a blind eye to emergence, complexity and robustness, which has had a profound influence on biological and biomedical research during the past 50 years.
The number of new drugs that are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration has declined steadily from more than 50 drugs per annum 10 years ago to less than 20 drugs in 2002. This worrying trend has persisted despite continuous mergers and acquisitions in the industry and annual research and development expenditures of approximately US$30 billion. Commentators have attributed this poor performance to a range of institutional causes . . . However, there is probably a more fundamental reason for these failures: namely, that most of these approaches have been guided by unmitigated reductionism. As a result, the complexity of biological systems, whole organisms and patients tends to be underrated (Horrobin, 2001). Most human diseases result from the interaction of many gene products, and we rarely know all of the genes and gene products that are involved in a particular biological function. Nevertheless, to achieve an understanding of complex genetic networks, biologists tend to rely on experiments that involve single gene deletions. Knockout experiments in mice, in which a gene that is considered to be essential is inactivated or removed, are widely used to infer the role of individual genes. In many such experiments, the knockout is found to have no effect whatsoever, despite the fact that the gene encodes a protein that is believed to be essential. In other cases, the knockout has a completely unexpected effect (Morange, 2001a). Furthermore, disruption of the same gene can have diverse effects in different strains of mice (Pearson, 2002). Such findings question the wisdom of extrapolating data that are obtained in mice to other species. In fact, there is little reason to assume that experiments with genetically modified mice will necessarily provide insights into the complex gene interactions that occur in humans (Horrobin, 2003).
Another defect of reductionist thinking is that it analyses complex network interactions in terms of simple causal chains and mechanistic models. This overlooks the fact that any clinical state is the end result of many biochemical pathways and networks, and fails to appreciate that diseases result from alterations to complex systems of homeostasis. Reductionists favour causal explanations that give undue explanatory weight to a single factor.
The high-level behaviour of a mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts, because a mechanism is built up out of parts, and reduction is therefore, literally, reverse engineering.
This characterization isn’t universally accepted. What you if simple can’t anticipate or compute the high-level effect due to the shear complexity and lack of total knowledge? For instance, the experience of pain can alter human behaviour, but the lower-level chemical reactions in the neurons that are involved in the perception of pain are not the cause of the altered behaviour, as the pain itself has causal efficacy. According to the principles of emergence, the natural world is divided into hierarchies that have evolved over evolutionary time (Kim, 1999; Morowitz, 2002). Reductionists advocate the idea of ‘upward causation’ by which molecular states bring about higher-level phenomena, whereas proponents of emergence accept ‘downward causation’ by which higher-level systems influence lower-level configurations (Kim, 1999).
Have a read:
Reductionism and complexity in molecular biology
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299179/
Some highlights
The constituents of a complex system interact in many ways, including negative feedback and feed-forward control, which lead to dynamic features that cannot be predicted satisfactorily by linear mathematical models that disregard cooperativity and non-additive effects...
An additional peculiarity of complex biological systems is that they are open—that is, they exchange matter and energy with their environment—and are therefore not in thermodynamic equilibrium...
In the past, the reductionist agenda of molecular biologists has made them turn a blind eye to emergence, complexity and robustness, which has had a profound influence on biological and biomedical research during the past 50 years.
The number of new drugs that are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration has declined steadily from more than 50 drugs per annum 10 years ago to less than 20 drugs in 2002. This worrying trend has persisted despite continuous mergers and acquisitions in the industry and annual research and development expenditures of approximately US$30 billion. Commentators have attributed this poor performance to a range of institutional causes . . . However, there is probably a more fundamental reason for these failures: namely, that most of these approaches have been guided by unmitigated reductionism. As a result, the complexity of biological systems, whole organisms and patients tends to be underrated (Horrobin, 2001). Most human diseases result from the interaction of many gene products, and we rarely know all of the genes and gene products that are involved in a particular biological function. Nevertheless, to achieve an understanding of complex genetic networks, biologists tend to rely on experiments that involve single gene deletions. Knockout experiments in mice, in which a gene that is considered to be essential is inactivated or removed, are widely used to infer the role of individual genes. In many such experiments, the knockout is found to have no effect whatsoever, despite the fact that the gene encodes a protein that is believed to be essential. In other cases, the knockout has a completely unexpected effect (Morange, 2001a). Furthermore, disruption of the same gene can have diverse effects in different strains of mice (Pearson, 2002). Such findings question the wisdom of extrapolating data that are obtained in mice to other species. In fact, there is little reason to assume that experiments with genetically modified mice will necessarily provide insights into the complex gene interactions that occur in humans (Horrobin, 2003).
Another defect of reductionist thinking is that it analyses complex network interactions in terms of simple causal chains and mechanistic models. This overlooks the fact that any clinical state is the end result of many biochemical pathways and networks, and fails to appreciate that diseases result from alterations to complex systems of homeostasis. Reductionists favour causal explanations that give undue explanatory weight to a single factor.
> If you’re planning on spending two months improving the revenue created by feature X by 3%, do the napkin math to see if existing revenue coming from X justifies two months salary.
How do you know they didn’t? That deck is just a summary of years of work. Perhaps reach out to Dan McKinley for further discussion. I’m afraid we’ve both just making a lot of speculation at this point. Talk to Dan.
When your revenue is 7-8 digits, 3% can add up! Sometimes it’s such a no-brainer that it’s not worth opening Excel over. Last week I had my devs spend a few days implementing a way to create DHL labels using an API. We didn’t do any cost-benefit analysis because it was so clearly something that needed to be done. Today we shipped 147 packages by DHL. That would have taken about 5m each to do the old manual way, so in one day it saved 9.5 hours of staff time. Over one-year that’s an entire salary.
But I think the presentation tells you why they weren’t doing that stuff:
And you know what, if the site’s growth is really insane, it looks like it’s working. You can release things and as long as they don’t completely destroy everything it will look like you’re a genius. All the graphs will go up and to the right.
You can read in the Farnum St. interview with Tobias Lutke, CEO at Shopify, how it held back Shopify’s growth. I’ve met Tobias and he’s a brilliant, level-headed engineer and CEO, but if you read that you’d probably conclude he’s irrational, stupid, and not ambitious enough for not relentlessly maximizing growth for that period. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Regarding testing and validation, of course there are exceptions, but generally speaking, it still looks like they got it backwards to me. You’re free to disagree. I’m running multiple companies and have produced many products and services—only one big failure. I’ve tried a lot of approaches and still mix and match many ideas, but can solidly endorse making the prototype in get the feedback.
Maybe you misunderstand how we think about prototyping. A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers. The prototype give you something concrete to put in front of customers for rich feedback and insights. But think lightweight (dirty) version of key aspects of a product or experience. The prototype only needs to be good enough to test out a hypothesis and nothing more. It’s all about testing big ideas with minimal upfront investment.
I recommend the design thinking methodology presented in “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.” Invented at Google by Jake Knapp, perfected with more than 150 startups at Google Ventuer (GV).
Prototype comes before Test.
https://www.thesprintbook.com/how
Cheers,
I’m not sure exactly what you disagree about, but thanks for the comparisons.
Here’s a nice comparison on Quora from someone “Practicing Yoga & Meditation since 2001”
Zen is a school of “sudden enlightenment”. You “just sit” on the cushion for a million years and with shear mind force destroy your ego and then you suddenly “get” it. Or (in the Rinzai school) you are given an absurd puzzle called Koan to solve. It throws your ego from its normal course that you reach Satori. Hence all the strange and crazy stories of Zen masters.
Vipassana is a school of “gradual enlightenment”. First you learn how to focus on a single object or awareness for extended period of time. Then with non-judgmental awareness you observe. With long enough practice your mental obstructions or “fetters” as Buddhism calls them are broken—one by one. When all the ten fetters are broken, you have reached.
I have tried Zen in a monastery setting and quickly found that its not my cup of tea. People’s temperaments are different. Some people may find Zen to be more appealing than the traditional Vipassana.
I would suggest you try out both a see which works for you. Its one thing to intellectually understand meditation and a totally different thing to sit in a cushion for 8-hours and watch your breath hit the tip of your nostrils.
Have you looked at the work of Sara Lazer PhD?
We study the impact of yoga and meditation on various cognitive and behavioral functions. Our results suggest that meditation can produce experience-based structural alterations in the brain. We also found evidence that meditation may slow down the age related atrophy of certain areas of the brain.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/sara_lazar/publications
And that’s just from one researcher.
A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of the Effects of Meditation on Empathy, Compassion, and Prosocial Behaviors
“Clinicians and meditation teachers should be aware that meditation can improve positive prosocial emotions and behaviors.”
I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying, “It’s dishonest to tell people that 10 minutes of daily meditation has worthwhile benefits”? Are you speaking from personal experience with meditation? Are you aware of the many benefits supported the scientific literature? Are you aware of any research that establishes necessary timelines or “ROI” estimates for those benefits? Do you think there might be a lot of individual variability around the benefits of meditation?
I’ve elaborated on my position here. Happy to hear your thoughts!
There are two rules for success in life. First, never tell anyone all that you know.
Just throw away the word “deep”. It’s a dumbbell theory.—an attempt to explain things in terms of opposing pairs of forces or principles. Can you cook, read, or exercise for 10m? Or is anything less than an hour considered “shallow cooking” or “light reading”? .
Ok then what in the world do you mean by “ cosnsciously” or “parts”? And why do you think we can’t make biological organisms? Is there something magical about then?
Google Craig Venter “synthetic life”
So emergence cannot be present in a mechanism if I “deliberately” make something but it can be it I make a mistake? So an emergent property is just anything accidental? Is software made from parts? So if I make a software application that has unexpected properties whether they are emergent or not all depends on how conscious I was of them when I set out?
Getting deep in meditation requires a huge investment of time and effort
Not really. You can start with just 5 or 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day for six weeks is just 5 hours (taking weekends off). Not such a huge investment for most. Just cut out a few hours of Netflix over the course of a month-and-a-half.
I think you’ll find some interesting ideas which address your first point in this Tim Keller talk, especially the points about “recipes vs understanding,” seeking first principles, and the point that 99% of what you think is wrong and you only have the remaining 1% to deal with that situation. I see meditation as a process to strength and expand that 1% part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
On the second point, Robert Wright’s book “Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment” does a pretty good job.
beautifully stated!
That’s quite an assertion. What’s your source? Evidence? Or is this mere conjecture (here, in this sacred space!)? ;) You advise others to only say true things, but why are you sure this is true?
There is a lot of ambiguity around major life decisions. Many decisions aren’t a matter of rationally weighing all the facts, but more a matter of analyzing a bunch of compromises and then rolling the dice. Many major decisions can be reversed later anyway.
I think most people, most of the time, make the best decisions for themselves that they know how. If someone’s decision looks like transparently bad logic to you, why not ask them about it?
No one has “full knowledge and consciousness” (whatever that means to you). We’re complicated beings with a multitude of urges and impulses.
Failing to master a foreign language is a “pathology”? People experiment. They try things to see if they’ll enjoy them enough to stick with them. I’ve tried to learn how to draw at various time in my life, but never made it a habit for very long. I guess it wasn’t that important to me. I quit watching movies and Netflix serials before the end. I don’t finish a lot of books that I start, and I don’t view this as a failing. If I don’t feel I’m getting much value out of that book, I’ll pick up a different book.
There is only so much time in the day. It’s not pathological to change your goals and priorities. There is no shame in quitting something. I proudly quit things all the time. I trained intensely as a freediver. I met interesting people, and learned more than I ever imagined I would. It was very enriching on many levels. I learned to hold my breath for five-and-a-half-minutes, entered and won a competition, and ranked in the top 10 here in Japan where I live. Then I quit, just like that. I felt that I learned about as much as I was going to learn and decided to free up my time. Same with photography. I got intensely into photography for a few years. Had a studio with +$30K in equipment. My photos landed on Page One of the NY Times, twice. Then I quit and sold off all my photo equipment to make time for other activities. So what? I started studying Chinese for 6-weeks while living in Beijing, then I stopped because I was traveling a lot, moved back to the US, and never continued with it. Am I pathological? Irrational? Did I do something wrong?
People have different skill-sets. Maybe math is your thing, maybe networking or operations management, culture building, or something else was the Etsy founder’s skill they got them started. You pick things up along the way. I’m been running a company for more than 10 years, and I’m only recently getting into doing a deeper analysis of our customer behaviors and fees. But they didn’t stop me from the success I’ve had up until now. You don’t have to be very intelligent to be successful in business. Look at Jack Ma.
Have you ever run a fast-growing startup? There are a metric-shit-ton of things you could be working on. Multiple fires are burning. No one has the time or the resources to do all the things they could be doing. You also have to to look at all the things Etsy did instead of A/B testing, like working on their platform, building their company culture, fund-raising, etc. I’m running multiple e-commerce companies with a team of 20. I’ve never done a proper A/B ever, yet I’ve served tens of thousands of customers in 100+ countries. I could get to work right away on those A/B tests, but everything comes with opportunity costs. Time I spend on the A/B test project is time I could spend doing R&D for our new data model, mentoring other managers, doing financial analysis, streamlining operations, or trying to give advice to some stranger on Less Wrong. What’s the most important thing I should be doing this very moment? Maybe we should ask Jack Dorsey. He seems to have his priorities and daily schedule all sorted out, but then he has the personality of a wet towel, so maybe we shouldn’t ask him ;) (And maybe being extremely-efficient all the time isn’t the best way develop as a human.)
You could go to any company and tell them 10 things they should be doing, and they will probably tell you, “I have a list of hundreds of things I should be doing. But I only have so many resources and so many hours in the day. Having a strategy is about what you will not do as much as what you will do.
I don’t follow this line-of-argument. Are you saying you didn’t know that you’d be weaker if you stopped working out? Surely you knew that. Your story doesn’t sound like an a matter of “having correct information,” but an issue of resolve. Motivation is complex. We can’t just reach into our brains and flip a switch—and that’s a good thing. It’s how nature prevents one part of the mind from shutting down all the other parts. Instead, when motivating oneself, we have to rely on some of the same strategies and tactics we use when motivating others.
If you want some input on specific topics like this, perhaps they work better as individual posts.
I could share my process for getting the most value out of the books I read. Maybe post that question separately and send me a link.
But reading over that list, it sounds like the general issue is a matter of setting clear priorities. Not everything can be a priority. So perhaps decide your top priorities for the next six weeks, and don’t beat yourself up about all things that you didn’t make a priority. I recommend taking some quiet time. Take long walks to clear your head. Mindfulness meditation is also a great way to clear your head. Start journaling. Write for 15 minutes a day in a notebook with a pen (not on your iPad or mobile phone). It doesn’t matter if you’re handing writing is terrible—you never really go back and read the stuff. It more about cultivating a habit of making time to think deliberatively and self-reflect.
Some starter topics you could journal about (+15 minutes each)
What’s your current context? Write a snapshot of your life at the moment.
What excites you about life? What brings you alive? When do you experience flow? What are you passionate about?
What do you love? What are the things you couldn’t live without? What are your favorite things? What flavors/sights/sounds/textures do you love? What lights you up, turns you on? What delights you?
How do you celebrate life? Maybe you have rituals or traditions? What do you do to rest or play and honor yourself?
What’s important to you? Why?
What do you need for self-care to keep you resourced / healthy / fit / resilient?
Describe who you are when you’re in flow? What is life like? How do you treat others? How easy is it to accomplish things?
What would someone write about you in a letter of recommendation? What do other people appreciate about you?
What are you doing that you should stop doing?
What am you not doing that you should start doing?
Write a letter to your future self one-year from now.
Further reading:
What’s All This About Journaling?
One of the more effective acts of self-care is also, happily, one of the cheapest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/style/journaling-benefits.html
When setting your priorities, for each thing you decide to do, take a sheet of paper and write down all the reasons why you’ve chosen this thing as a priority. How does it fit in with your goals and values?