January 2020: did I get better?

It’s the last day of the month.

The month started out shitty and then got better. At least it got better later on the first day.

But how about the entire month?

Is Mike _{Jan 31, 2020} an improvement over Mike _{Jan 1, 2020}?

How would I go about measuring that?

Measuring changes in knowledge

I wrote that knowledge is the measure of all things that matter. And I meant it.

If I had a way to measure my knowledge today, I could compare it to my knowledge at the start of the month. That might tell me something.

If.

There’s a problem.

Even if I could measure some of the knowledge I’ve gained, it’s not obvious how to measure what I’ve lost.

For example: what did I remember at the start of the month that I don’t remember anymore?

I don’t remember what I’ve forgotten.

So maybe I can’t measure what I’ve lost. But I could potentially measure what I’ve gained.

I think it’s worth considering how to to do that.

Why?

Because measuring knowledge will give me more knowledge, and I heard somewhere that knowledge is the measure of all things that matter.

Even thinking about measuring has increased my knowledge.

So HMB while I tell you what I learned by thinking.

Some conclusions

1. I am better today than on January 1.
2. I could have been better if I had measured. What gets measured, gets done, they say.
3. The most straightforward measure: every day, write a “Today I Learned” blog post.
4. Another measure: make a list of knowledge that I want to acquire, and note what I knock off the list, and what I don’t.
5. I’ve written 22 posts in this blog this month (not counting this one and any others I finish today.) Each represents a gain in knowledge. Some of the posts represent significant gains.
6. I read some past posts and gained from them.
7. My OneTab saved tabs from the start of the month represent new knowledge. But if I don’t do something with them, I’ll lose that knowledge.
8. I started an experiment in which I exported all my OneTab tabs, did some processing, and imported them in a spreadsheet. But I don’t remember how I did it, or where it is. Next month I want to recover that knowledge.
9. I learned about OneNote from Alexey Guzey’s writing and started to learn to use it. I imported my first month’s worth of blog posts into OneNote, but haven’t done anything with them.
10. Today I started writing something about “Debugging.” I think finishing that post and following up on it is probably the most important thing that I can work on.

I think I’ll do that shortly.

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Knowledge is the measure of all things that matter

We are made of knowledge.

We start with a knowledge endowment.

We live our lives gathering knowledge.

Some of that knowledge is incorporated in our bodies. Some we store outside our bodies.

It’s reasonable to say that we are the sum of all our knowledge.

Take all our knowledge away, and there’s not much left of us.

In the end, we lose all the knowledge our bodies once contained.

Knowledge, defined

My definition of knowledge is the one I learned from David Deutsch and wrote about here

?Information is something with the following properties:

• It requires a physical substrate. There is no way to have information without embedding it in a physical medium.
• It is substrate independent. The same information can in any medium. It can be written on paper, encoded in magnetic domains, transformed into sound waves, resident in a human brain.
• It is not observable. There’s no way to see information directly. You can see the medium or substrate. You can extract the information from the attributes of the substrate. But you cannot see the information itself.

Yet, information exists.

Knowledge is a particular kind of information: it’s information that an environment tends to preserve.

Knowledge can exist without a knower.

It took a long time before the universe accumulated enough knowledge to give rise to beings that could know.

It took longer to give rise to beings who could know that they could know.

It took 13.8 billion years, approximately, for the universe to produce this blog post.

Good job, universe. Worth waiting for.

Our initial endowment of knowledge

Once we were infants.

We were born with a priceless endowment of knowledge.

Our initial endowment was in our DNA. It was knowledge that our forebears’ environment had caused to persist and accumulate.

Half your knowledge endowment came from the sperm and half from the egg that united to become the zygote that ultimately became your infant self.

Starting from just about nothing, it took about 4 billion years for the environment to collect the knowledge required to create a human being.

Knowledge transformation

As we changed from zygote to infant the knowledge inscribed in our DNA was transformed and incorporated in the structure of our bodies.

Our bodies became the new substrate for our knowledge endowment.

We would have died if we had not been born with the knowledge we needed to survive.

Our bodies knew when they needed food. They knew how to manipulate the body to get food when it was offered.

Our rooting reflex was the knowledge that we used to turn our heads toward possible food sources.

Our sucking reflex was the knowledge we used so we could suck when presented with a suckable food source.

Our bodies were equipped with the knowledge we needed to digest food and to use that food to extract energy and complete the construction of an adult body.

Our immersion in an ocean of knowledge

As infants, we were born into environments that were filled with knowledge that had been accumulated by the culture in which we were raised.

That culture included knowledge accumulated by pre-cultural humans and by our pre-human ancestors.

Our infant bodies were the only substrates we had for collecting the knowledge that we needed to have readily available.

Knowledge in the environment was available but not useful until we’d begun to incorporate it in or bodies.

All the knowledge to speak English is present in an English-speaking environment—but useless until a baby begins to gain the knowledge needed to make the sounds of English.

That knowledge provides a reward that encourages the baby to incorporate the basic vocabulary of English and approximate rules of grammar in its nervous systems.

Error correction

Something does not have to be true to qualify as knowledge. It just needs to be preserved.

Knowledge can contain errors and often does.

The knowledge embedded in our DNA produces brains that we now understand have inbuilt biases, defects, and deficiencies.

We’ve generated knowledge about these systematic errors. We can acquire that knowledge and correct those errors—or at least reduce their impact.

The difference is knowledge

The principal difference between an infant and a baby, a baby and a child, a child and an adult is the knowledge that it has acquired and the errors that it’s able to correct.

Most of that knowledge is incorporated in the brain and body.

But as we mature, we store some of our acquired knowledge outside our bodies. Babies can’t do this, but adults can. We live in a sea of knowledge and preserve the bits we find most useful in whatever substrate best suits the knowledge and our needs.

In the early parts of our lives, we gain more knowledge than we lose. At some point, the balance shifts. We lose the knowledge that we have incorporated in our bodies as skills deteriorate, and memories fade. And when we die, all the knowledge we have incorporated in our bodies is lost, and only the knowledge we have moved to other substrates, like this blog, remains.

Remove the knowledge we have been endowed with and the knowledge we have accumulated and the knowledge that we’ve given rise to in others, and there’s nothing left.

Knowledge is the measure of all things that matter.

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PostProcessing: 4000 tabs to close

For several years I’ve been using a tool called OneTab. It’s a Chrome plugin that closes tabs and adds them to a list of tabs that it maintains on each computer.

I’m a victim of TPD—Tab Proliferation Disorder. When I discover I’ve got too many tabs open at once—and by “too many” I often mean 30 or more—I lose them with OneTab. That way, I get my (the computer’s) memory back without losing my memory of what tabs I had open.

My workhorse computer is now up to nearly 4000 tabs, and I’ve got a bunch of closed tabs on other machines. So today, I decided to start closing more than I open.

That decision led to an intention and a plan as I’ve written about here.

A lot of the tabs are repeats. Many of them are programs I have pen regularly, like Gmail, or StackEdit, or even OneTab.

So I plan to go through the tabs, deleting the ones that I can, opening the ones I’d like to not forget about. I’ll write some of them in this blog and some in another, Random S*&# I Learned Today.

I’ll tag both the posts that come from OneTab in both blogs with “OneTab.”

I’ll keep track of how many posts I have left to close here.

Date	Time	Tabs
2002/1/26	1635	3992

Tags: OneTab

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Attention on intention and metaintention

This morning I woke up with my attention on intention.

Still half asleep, I intended to do a lot of writing. But I realized that wasn’t enough.

I realized that I also needed to stay aware of the state of my intention.

So I needed two intentions.

Retrospectively, an assessment

Since I intended to write, I decided to write about intention first. Why not?

I decided to start by doing some research. As it happens, I’ve written about intention before. A lot. And as it happens, I’m one of my favorite writers, and I decided to read what I’d written.

So: I had an intention (and a metaintention). I’d made a decision. I had a plan.

I’d write a post that would include a checklist.

I predicted success

Intentional failure

In the post “Intentional failure” I wrote:

TL;DR: everything that happens comes from intention. If what I want to have happened has not happened, then I need to fix the intention. If I’m not fixing my (failed) intentions, then my metaintention needs fixing.

In the post, I recorded some questions that I might have asked:

1. Does the intention specify the correct endpoint?
2. Is the endpoint specific enough?
3. Is the intention strong enough?
4. Does the intention include producing a plan?

Thanks, Past Me. I’ll keep those in mind right now. My intention to write about intention meets all those criteria. My intention to monitor my intention—pretty good.

Intention deficit disorder

Next up, this post, “Intention Deficit Disorder”.

Since I came up with the idea, I’ve been reviewing how I carry out intentional acts and when unintentional acts intrude. I’ve been thinking about what I might do to improve my ability to use whatever powers of intention that I have.

What I learned:

1. Is the decision behind the intention clear?
2. Does the intention lead to a first action?
3. Does it include an intention to follow through to the end?
4. Does the intention anticipate obstacles and the intention to overcome them?

Intention lost, intention regained?

Next up, this one: “Intention lost, intention regained?”

In December 2016, I wrote a post about the purpose of life, the universe, and everything. In July 2017, I wrote a longer post on the same subject..

I know my purpose: it’s gaining knowledge, organizing it, and communicating it.

So I added this:

1. Is the intention aligned to your purpose in life?

Decision intention prediction

Next up: “Decision, intention, prediction”

Intention comes from decision. If an intention is strong enough, it will lead to action. To control action, start with a decision, and test with prediction.

I’ve already covered by the decision step. But here’s another:

1. Do you predict you’ll succeed in reaching your goal?

Why meditate? Redux

From this one, Why Meditate? Redux

Daniel said:

If meditating doesn’t enhance the other 15 hours of your life (8 for sleep and 1 for meditation) - I don’t know why anyone would do it.
You can learn detachment without losing 6.25% of your conscious life.

My goal in meditation and in life is not detachment. It is awareness. (Actually, awareness is a means, not an end. The end is knowledge.)

Especially awareness of the state of my mind

Especially awareness of my current intention (or lack) and awareness of any newly arising intentions of and any change in intention

1. Are you aware of any other rising intention or change in intention?

An intentional meditation on intention and meditation

In this post, “An intentional meditation on intention and meditation”, I quoted this from “The Mind Illuminated.”:

…while it may not be obvious, all our achievements originate from intentions. Consider learning to play catch. As a child, you may have wanted to play catch, but at first, your arm and hand just didn’t move in quite the right way. However, by sustaining the intention to catch the ball, after much practice, your arm and hand eventually performed the task whenever you wanted. “You” don’t play catch. Instead, you just intend to catch the ball, and the rest follows. “You” intend, and the body acts.

1. Are you maintaining your intention?

Excellent meditation

In this post, “Excellent meditation”, I riff further on intention.

In short: talk about how you use intention to learn to catch a ball.

We don’t know how to do anything. It’s all due to intention and magic.

If you’ve learned to catch a ball, you set an intention to catch it, and when a ball comes in your direction, you catch it.

Easy.

How? Nobody knows.

But first, you’ve got to learn how to catch a ball. And how do you do
that?

You intend to learn to catch. Someone throws balls in your direction.
You try to catch it. You alternately fail and succeed. And then one
day, you’ve learned that you can do it.

The point’s been covered, and this reinforces it.

The inner game of—whatever

This reminds me of Farnam Street Blog’s post in today’s Farnam Street - Brain Food No. 353.

The lead article is about “The Inner Game: Why Trying Too Hard Can Be Counterproductive”.

The article is about Tim Gallwey’s idea of “the inner game” as described in his book The Inner Game of Tennis.

Here’s a YouTube Video with as Tim Gallway gives a woman at tennis lesson. Her progress is rapid, and surprising:

Gallwey’s point and mine are: to get better, all you need to do is pay attention.

The more you try, the worse you’re likely to do!

Consciousness, Awareness, Attention, Intention

From here, “Consciousness, Awareness, Attention, Intention”, this idea:

Intention is a big deal. You can’t program the unconscious mind directly, but you can get it to reprogram itself by intention. The way you become skilled at a sport is by going through the motions, with attention and intention. Merely going through the motions is not enough.

Repeating simple tasks with a clear intention can reprogram unconscious mental processes. This can completely transform who you are as a person.

You get the idea, Future Me?

The checklist

So here’s my checklist for evaluating and monitoring intention:

1. Does the intention specify the correct endpoint?
2. Is the endpoint specific enough?
3. Is the intention strong enough?
4. Does the intention include producing a plan?
5. Is the decision behind the intention clear?
6. Does the intention lead to a first action?
7. Does it include an intention to follow through to the end?
8. Does the intention anticipate obstacles and the intention to overcome them?
9. Is the intention aligned to your purpose in life?
10. Do you predict your plan will succeed?
11. Are you aware of any other rising intention or change in intention?
12. Are you maintaining your intention?

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Things I'm excited about in 2020

Mira asked our extended family group to say what we’re excited about in 2020. What are we looking forward to?

Holy crap! What am I not excited about?

What am I not looking forward to?

(Fuck you, Grammarly. I like those sentences, even if they end with prepositions.)

The Tony Robbins story

I remember reading Tony Robbins’ book, “Awaken the Giant Within” years ago. IIRC he asks two men how their lives are going.

The first one: “Well, not so good. I planned to make $12 million this year and came in with just under $10 mill. And then I’ve been training to run a five-minute mile, and I can’t get it under 5:10.”

The second one: “Great! I woke up this morning, and I was still above ground!!”

That’s the way I feel.

I’m not dead yet, and that’s enough.

The lenses through which I’m looking at life turn everything into a miracle.

(Hint: the lenses don’t include drugs unless you count SuperPlacebo. And Modafinil, which seems less and less necessary.)

I am surrounded by miracles.

Like flowers!! How does that amaryllis bulb know how to make an amaryllis.

Like writing. How does that happen, anyway? Really, how is this blog post getting written? Where did this sentence come from? Don’t tell me it’s neurons. Are you kidding? Then neurons are a miracle.

And speaking of writing, I’m really excited about writing.

Writing

I started my blog a few days before I hit 70. Well, this blog, anyway.

It’s been seven years, and I’ve published 513 posts.

513!

That’s a worthy accomplishment.

I’m sure some of them suck, and maybe the all suck for you. But I didn’t write them for you. I wrote them for me. And for Future Me.

When I read one of my earlier posts, I’m usually surprised and pleased to see how good I think they are.

Thank you, Past Me, for writing all this stuff.

So I’m excited about writing a ton this year and looking forward to making my writing better.

Why? Are you kidding? Words are appearing on the page. Miracles in action!

And I’m also excited about reading more of those old posts and maybe doing something with some of them.

Podcasts

There are two reasons I’m interested. No, three. No…more.

No one expects that Spanish Inquisition!

More and more, people are getting information and knowledge from podcasts, either in addition to or rather than books. The reason that I think this is happening might be a topic for another post. Or not. The point is: they are.

One of my top fans (Mira) has told me that she doesn’t read much, but she listens to podcasts all the time, so if only to reach her, I’m motivated to put my posts in listenable form.

We’ve been talking about me doing one, or us doing one together, and I’ve got two ideas from our discussion: one is “I’m not dead yet’ or maybe better “You’re not dead yet.” Another is: “See one, do one, teach one.” More on both of these later.

Writing

Did I mention writing? Oh, right, I did. Well, the last section alone has a bunch of things that I want to write more about, and I’m excited about writing them.

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality

AR and VR are happening, and they are going to change the world. (And I’m going to write about them)

A couple of years ago, I was given a Google Daydream headset (thank you Daniel (and Dana)), and a demo of an HTC Vive gaming headset (thank you, Konrad), and I was blown away by both. This year I got was given an Oculus Quest headset (thank you Alyssa and Kon) and holy crap! It was beyond amazing. I started thinking about things that I could do with that technology–and got myself an Oculus Go to experiment with, and I’ve just upgraded my power workstation to one that’s Windows Mixed Reality capable. (Thanks, Justin and Daniel for help getting me going)

AR/VR are entertaining, sure, but that’s not what’s got me stoked.

It’s the potential for transforming education. No, it’s the potential for transforming people.

There’s another post right there.

You won’t appreciate the difference between seeing a picture and being immersed in an environment until you put on your headset and travel somewhere.

Music

I love music. If I’m in a funk, I can defunk myself pretty reliably by playing some uplifting music.

A few weeks ago, I decided to try writing songs about some of the ideas that I’ve written about and some that I haven’t. The theory is (and here’s something else to write about) when you constrain the ways you can solve the problem, you sometimes come up with a better solution–one that you would not have discovered without the constraint. This is how poetry works. It’s also something I learned from reading Edward DeBono’s “Lateral Thinking.”

When I was around sixty-two or -three, I had the idea of writing rock opera, “Still alive at sixty-five.” Then Tom Rothschild died, and it seemed wrong to celebrate.

More likely, that was just a convenient excuse. But whatever. Seventy-five has passed (and would have sucked because of the extra syllable), but eighty-five and ninety-five both look good. So why the fuck not?

So I started digging into how people make music these days, and holy crap is that interesting!

Here’s the idea that’s stuck in my head (and another post) “Life plus tech equals music.”

Writing

Did I mention writing about what I’m learning about music creation? Not specifically. But, yeah.

Software development

I’ve been on a quest my entire professional life to create a set of tools to match a vision that I have about software creation.

This past year I collected some tools that others had developed that start to approach my goal. So I’m excited about that, too.

Writing

Did I mention that I want to write about that, too?

And so on

The world is full of possibilities. I am full of possibilities. This post could go on for pages and pages and pages.

But enough.

You get the idea.

More importantly, I get the idea. And now it’s time to post this and write and do some of the other stuff that I’m excited about.

Still with the prepositions, Grammarly?

Remember: you’re not dead yet. And neither am I.

(Bonus: Here’s Moby in his studio around the time he produced “Play,” one of my favorite albums. (YouTube)The reason there’s so little tech around him is: it was around 30 years ago, and it’s his apartment, and there’s not much room.

Enough!

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The secret of life

I want to learn the secret of life.

Scratch that.

There isn’t just one secret to life. I’ve already learned many secrets of life. And I’ve written about them. So they aren’t secrets anymore.

I’d like to remember the ones I’ve discovered.

“Good,” a voice says. “Make a list.”

“I will,” I say. And I started. “But first I want to learn another one of the secrets of life. I want to learn the secret of being consistent.”

“What do you mean?” The voice asks.

“I’d like to decide to behave in a certain way and then continue to behave in that way until I decide to behave differently. That’s the secret I want.”

“There’s no secret,” the voice says. “You do something once, then do it again and again until you decide to do something different. You can do something once, can’t you?”

I think about that one. “I don’t seem to be able to do that,” I say. “Sometimes, I start, and I don’t finish. So maybe I’m not looking for the secret of being consistent, but the secret of completing what I start.”

“There’s no secret,” says the voice. “You just start and keep going until you finish.”

I think about that. “I don’t seem to be able to do it,” I say. “I get distracted. So maybe I need to know the secret of not being distracted.”

“No secret,” the voice answers. “Just notice when you start to be distracted and then return your attention to what you were doing.”

I think about that. “I don’t seem to be able to do it,” I say. “Maybe I need to learn the secret of noticing when I start to be distracted and returning my attention to what I was doing.”

“No secret,” the voice might answer. “Just notice what you are doing and then notice when what you are noticing changes to noticing something else, then return your attention to what you were doing.”

I think about that. “I know how to notice what I am doing,” I say. “And I suppose if I noticed I was doing something different, I’d notice that unless I stopped noticing at all. Or I forgot what I was noticing in the first place, so I didn’t notice the difference. So maybe I need to learn the secret of…

“Of what?” the voice asks?

“I don’t know,” I say. “But I think I’ve just learned another secret of life.”

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Connecting Past Me and Future Me

This post, Setting my direction, started with an email from Past Me. Why was Past Me sending me an email?

When Past Past Past Me (or maybe Past Past Past Past Me) had been writing his Daily Pages, he had started to write about something that he called “Tolerable irrationality.”

Tolerable irrationality

If you asked me if I’m a rational person, I’d say “yes”—or maybe “mostly, yes”—and then get on with my life.

But I’m not.

I have irrationalities that I’ve learned to tolerate.

The other day I ran into two of them, of different kinds, and said:

“No more.”

But I’ve said that before.

He had said something like that before. He’d written about noticing irrational acts, and then “debugging” himself. He’d written Debugging and Programming AutoMike: Introduction , and Debugging and reconditioning myself, and More debugging, and Waking up, Day 30. And he kept forgetting.

He’d written about the forgetting, not once but many times. For example: Memento, Redux, and Memento.

How was he going to remember that which he kept forgetting?

When he’d been losing and having to discover his purpose and his direction for years, how could he maintain continuity?

It took him a few deaths and rebirths to focus on the problem sufficiently to invent a new approach.

His answer was: each night before he went to sleep, he’d send his future self an email. And so, last night, my Past Self did that.

And this morning, the email arrived.

A message from the past

Here’s how this morning’s email started:

Dear Future Me,

I send love and greetings from your past and love and hope for your future.

You’ve inherited sufficient material wealth to live a fairly free life. You’ve inherited loving friends and family. You’ve inherited a fit and healthy body. You’ve inherited a great deal of knowledge and information. I hope you’ll do something
productive with it, and leave more for your Future Self than you’ve inherited from your Past Selves.

Here are my hopes for you.

I am writing this email to you, one copy be delivered to you tomorrow morning at 5:30 AM and another at 9:00 PM

I hope is that you will read it as soon as you wake up.

It would be nice if you woke at 5:30 but if you don’t, that’s fine.

I continued with a set of instructions. I accomplished some things. Failed with others.

But I did make some progress.

And I did write a note to Future me, one copy to arrive at 5:30 AM and the other at 9:00 PM.

It’s novel, so it will work for a while.

How long will it go?

My predictive model says at least a week.

So as soon as I post this, I’m writing a note to Future Me. I’ll schedule it to arrive about a week from now. The note will remind him to read this post and let me know how it’s gone.

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