There but for fortune, go I

Many people believe that if they lived in Germany in the 1940s, they wouldn’t have been Nazis. They would have bravely stood against Hitler, and protected Europe’s Jews. Out of 80 million Germans (Germany and Austria), a few thousand were resistance fighters. A few hundred have been recognized for saving the lives of Jews. To be one of them, you’d need to be better than more than 99.999% of your peers.

In how many other respects do you think you’re that much better?

You’d have a better chance of having been against slavery in the South in the 1800s, but your odds would still be slim. There were some Southern abolitionists, but they were few. There were thousands of soldiers from the South who joined the Union Army, but most of them served to preserve the Union, for which their ancestors had fought, and not an endorsement of abolition.

This thought arose when I read this excellent post, The Four Quadrants of Conformism by Paul Graham, and this article found by my sometime research partner, Daniel.

Average is average

The average person is average. Of course, we vary from the people around us. We’re not clones. But only exceptional people differ in extraordinary ways.

I’m above average by some measures, below average by others. But on average, I’m average.

I believe that my IQ and the span of my knowledge—in certain domains—are well above average. In a typical field, I’m average.

To the degree that I’m exceptional, I’m exceptional, just like everyone else. For example, everything that is real for me appears in my consciousness. Only mine. Extraordinary. Just like for you.

Your community might be different

If you accept the premise that we’re mostly average and that you’re more likely (in general) to go along with your community, then consider this:

If you had born into a conservative community, rather than the liberal community that you’d been born into, you’d be the same human being that you are today but with roughly opposite opinions.

If you had born into a liberal community, rather than the conservative community that you’d been born into, you’d be the same human being that you are today, but with roughly opposite opinions.

You’d see the arguments of the people in the community you’d been born into as mostly correct. You’d have differences of opinion, of course, but on the whole, you’d agree. When you saw some of their arguments as wrong, you’d likely see them as understandably wrong.

You’d see the arguments of the people in the community that you had not been born into as mostly incorrect. You might agree with them from time to time, of course, but on the whole, you’d disagree. When you saw some of their arguments as wrong, you’d see them as indefensibly wrong.

You might get angry at the people in the group you were not born into for the harm that you saw them doing. But if you had been born among those people, you’d see what they were doing as good, and you’d see your current group as the one doing harm.

Born biased

We’re all born biased, and we’re all born with brains that work hard to confirm our biases. Our brains do that even after we’ve learned about confirmation bias.

With careful attention, some of us manage to reconsider some of our opinions and change our minds. Then we congratulate ourselves on a job well done.

But our congratulations are probably premature.

My history

I was born into a liberal family in a liberal community. I grew up with liberals. I could not understand how conservatives could hold the opinions that they held and still be rational and decent people. I met people who seemed rational and trustworthy, who loved their kids, did their jobs, and didn’t torture dumb animals. Then I’d hear some of the ideas that they espoused, and I’d have second thoughts about their rationality and decency.

How could anyone believe that?

It took a while for me to learn to appreciate—not simply reject—ideas that were different from mine. I learned to appreciate ideas—not just from political conservatives—but others whose coordinate systems were dramatically different than my own.

It took longer to realize that if I had been born among those people, those alien ideas would have been mine.

Now I see things this way:

Any idea that that’s consistent with my upbringing is suspect. If it’s survived scrutiny, so far, I still think it’s got validity. But I know it might be wrong.

How can I tell if the reason that I find that an idea that’s compatible with my upbringing is likely to be correct? It could be that I was taught that wrong idea, and have not yet seen the error. Or it could be that the idea is correct.

I don’t know, and I can’t know.

That thought is humbling.

Any idea that I have that I’ve adopted, even though it’s inconsistent with my upbringing, is also suspect, but less so. To embrace such an idea, I have already paid the price: I broke my conditioning and went against the group that taught me what was right. Still, it could be wrong.

Shapiro and me

I disagree with Ben Shapiro on many things, but I learned this from him: he said that he determines the facts of a matter by reading conservative viewpoints and liberal viewpoints on the subject. What they agree on is fact. What they disagree on is opinion.

That’s a pretty good rule, and I credit Shapiro for passing it on to me. I’m not convinced that Shapiro is careful to follow that rule. He seems to assert many “facts” with which I, as a liberal, disagree. Or perhaps he is not stating them as facts, just not labeling them as opinions.

Fundamental error

I think that it’s a fundamental error to blame other people for having wrong beliefs. There might be exceptions, but the rule seems a good one.

I think it’s an error to blame yourself for not seeing earlier that a belief that you had been taught was incorrect. There might be exceptions here, but I find them hard to imagine.

People do the best that they can to have correct beliefs because that’s what their communities teach them. What communities teach people to hold onto incorrect beliefs?

Some communities do teach people not to question the beliefs held by the people in those communities. But that’s because those communities hold that it’s correct not to question their beliefs. Why would they teach something that they did not believe was true?

There but for fortune

When I see people behaving in ways that seem to me to be outright wrong, I used to condemn them for their obvious error.

Now I’m more likely to respond with compassion.

There, but for fortune, go I.

There, but for the grace of God, if there is a God, go I.

There, but for an accident of birth, go I.

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Consciousness, Redux

Here’s a summary of some of the things I have learned through meditation practice and through listening to skilled practitioners and reading what they’ve written.

1. Consciousness is the only thing of which I can be certain. (Thank you, Sam Harris!).
2. I am not entirely sure of what consciousness is. No one seems to be. But I know it when I see it. In me, because that’s the only place where I experience it.
3. Awareness is different than consciousness. When I am not asleep, I am not conscious of most of what is around me. But I am aware of some things of which I am not conscious.
4. Attention is different than awareness and consciousness
5. The Mind Illuminated proposes that both awareness and attention are aspects of consciousness. The goal of meditation is to find an optimum balance.
6. I am usually not conscious of consciousness, aware of being aware, or paying attention to what I am paying attention to.
7. In a guided meditation, I am directed to become conscious of consciousness, objects in consciousness, awareness, and attention. When I am invited to become more mindful or aware or attentive, I tend to become so.
8. One of the attributes of consciousness I have become acutely aware of this: objects arise consciousness, and they pass away. Both happen effortlessly and cannot be prevented other than, I suppose, by being rendered unconscious.
9. Another: I can partly control attention and awareness, but attention also moves without my bidding, and awareness changes without my direction.
10. I don’t control what specific thought or experience arises, but I can influence what sorts of thoughts or experiences are likely to arise.
11. I am conscious of “objects in consciousness” more often than I am conscious of consciousness itself.
12. The “sense of self” is just one more “object in consciousness.”
13. When I am conscious of consciousness, all that exists for me (in that moment) is only what is in the “field of consciousness.”
14. To the degree that I can say that I am certain of something, that certainty ought to be grounded in consciousness. Often it is not.
15. . I am sometimes conscious of the contents of a dream and yet not conscious of the fact that I am dreaming. I am sometimes conscious of both.
16. What arises in consciousness is always an illusion. It cannot be otherwise. But I am rarely aware that I am seeing an illusion.

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Equanimity is in the depths

A thought came to me.

Yesterday, a thought came to me, and it was a shitty thought.

Thoughts come to me from time to time.

Ideas.

Notions.

Perhaps they come to you the same way.

How they come

I might be sitting with “nothing on my mind,” and a thought comes to me. It could be about anything.

I might have my attention on a problem, and a thought about how to solve that problem comes to me.

Sometimes a useful thought comes.

Sometimes a useless thought comes.

Sometimes nothing comes.

How I write

Often I sit in front of my keyboard, perhaps to do my 750 words, and have no idea what I am going to write about.

Thoughts about what to write come to me.

If I accept one of those thoughts and turn my attention to it, my fingers start typing. The words and ideas that elaborate the thought come to me. This is the thought process and the process of writing.

Perhaps I sit in front of my keyboard, with a topic in mind. Thoughts about that topic come.

Like now.

Encouraging thoughts

Sometimes I do things that seem to encourage some kinds of thoughts.

It seems to me that I do the things that encourage certain kinds of thoughts, but it does not seem to me that I make any specific thoughts appear.

They seem to arise by themselves.

If I ask myself a question, thoughts that answer the question arise. If I turn my attention in some direction, thoughts appropriate to that direction arise. I can prepare the field of consciousness in which thoughts arise.

But I don’t decide which thoughts arise.

The thoughts that arise might be the result of seeds that I planted some time before. But in the moment, the ideas come to me. The thoughts arise. I don’t do anything.

Yesterday’s shitty thought

As I said at the top of this essay, the thought that came to me yesterday was a shitty thought. It was an angry, annoyed, resentful thought.

I haven’t had thoughts like that in a while, so I was unprepared. For the last several weeks, my mind has been tranquil.

Not yesterday.

Other shitty thoughts followed the first one, including metashitty thoughts about the fact that my mind was being filled with shitty thoughts and metashitty thoughts about how shitty I was for not being able to get rid of them.

Then a memory arose: the first shitty thoughts had begun to appear the previous night, after many days of pleasant thoughts, tranquil thoughts, equanimous thoughts.

I’d had a day filled with frustrations. The code that I was working on didn’t work for mysterious reasons that seemed to go away only after I’d rebooted my computer.

Then it didn’t work for mysterious reasons that turned out to be a stupid mistake on my part.

Then my smartwatch disconnected itself from my phone and reinstalling and rebooting didn’t help.

Then some other shitty little first world problem.

By bedtime, agitation had replaced equanimity. I struggled to get to sleep, and finally, with the help of some chemicals, I got to sleep.

Next morning, more shit

In the morning, I woke up. I briefly looked forward to the day. Then more shitty thoughts arose.

I got crankier and crankier.

I tried to get rid of the shitty thoughts, but more appeared.

The disaster cascaded,

But finally realized this:

Thoughts arise. They appear. They go away,

I couldn’t control what thoughts arose. I might influence what thoughts arose, but I didn’t have control.

So what could I do?

I didn’t know.

A thought ecology

I tried to think ecologically: thoughts seem to arise in an environment that’s prepared for them. Once a thought arises, then like any life form, it may change the environment so that it’s hospitable for other, similar entities.

Perhaps a tranquil environment will attract tranquil thoughts, and an agitated environment invites agitation. A shitty environment invites shitty thoughts.

So what to do when too many shitty thoughts arise?

One thought was to mobilize an “army of tranquility.” But tranquility does not join armies. There can be no army of tranquility. Agitation and anxiety can join forces, but bringing in the tranquility reserve is not going to work.

Instead, I thought that the answer was something like this: to recognize that unlike agitation, which comes and goes, that equanimity is always there.

Equanimity is in the depths

Agitation is on the surface.

Equanimity is in the depths.

Why this might be true is uncertain.

Nor was it true that it is certain.

But those are the thoughts that arose.

Slowly the surface calmed. The storm blew by.

And tranquility reappeared.

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On resumes--stupid and not

I’m pretty good at writing and reviewing resumes, and when someone points a friend in my direction, I give them pretty much the same speech. So to save us all time, here’s what I say:

The speech

When I was a hiring manager, I thought that most of the resumes that came across my desk were stupid.

Objective
I’m looking for a challenging job working with a high-performing team where I can leverage my skills to make an impact and advance my career as a …whatever

Great. That will make you stand out from the other resumes I get. The ones that say stuff like:

I’m looking for an easy job working with a bunch of slackers, a job for which I am entirely unqualified, and that will cause no discernable results and retard my career as…whatever

What? I don’t get that kind of resume?

What do the other resumes look like?

Exactly the same as yours.

Full of buzzwords.

Challenging. High performing. Leverage. Impact. Advance.

Zzzzz

Differentiate

You’ve got to differentiate. Your resume won’t help you if it sounds like everyone else’s. It won’t help me understand who you are if it’s full of stupid cliches—unless you are a stupid cliche. In that case, perfect.

But no one is a cliche. We’ve all got unique strengths. Your resume is an advertisement. It’s a sales pitch for you. And it’s got to include what they call in the marketing biz, your “Unique Selling Proposition.”

Your USP is what makes you different from everyone else who’s looking for that same job.

A typical resume starts with an objective. Here’s where you say what you are looking for.

Seriously? As a hiring manager, I know what you’re looking for. And I don’t care that much. I know you are looking for a job. My job. That’s what you want.

I don’t care about what you want. I care about what I want. And what I want is to know: “Why should I hire you?”

Scratch that. What I want to know first is: why should I even bother talking to you.

Elevator pitch

When you’re in sales, you develop an Elevator Pitch for your product. It’s in Wikipedia: “…a short description of an idea, product or company that explains the concept in a way such that any listener can understand it in a short period of time.”

So your resume should start with your elevator pitch for you.

If I was looking for a job in technical sales, say, I might write something like this:

Executives, managers, and software engineers speak different languages. I speak those languages fluently. I’ve used those skills to close multi-million-dollar software and services sales.

I’ve succeeded by understanding the objectives of decision-makers in each group, helping them see how what I sold will meet their needs, and by translating the needs of the other groups, so they understand one another better. That’s let me establish relationships of trust that have helped develop business after the initial sale.

Think that’s better than “A challenging job leveraging….zzzzz?”I think so.

Adapatation

But as good as that is, I would never send that out. Instead, I’d adapt it for a particular company. Like this:

Executives, managers, and software engineers speak different languages. I speak those languages fluently. I’ve used those skills to close multi-million-dollar software and services sales, and I can use them to sell Acme Widgets and Services

I’ve succeeded by understanding the objectives of decision-makers in each group, helping them see how products and services like the ones that Acme sells will meet their needs, and by translating the needs of the other groups, so they understand one another better. That’s let me establish relationships of trust that have helped develop business after the initial sale.

Of course, I wouldn’t put the bolded parts in bold. That’s just to highlight the changes I would make.

And I’d probably tweak more depending on how I viewed the situation.

Why?

A hiring decision is a big sale

Suppose, to make the math easy, you’re going to make $50,000 a year. I know you make more but follow the math and multiply to get your actual deal size.

With benefits, taxes, and overhead, you’re going to cost most companies about 2x your salary. So $100,000.

Say they expect you’ll be there for five years before moving on.

That’s a half-million-dollar sale.

When I’ve created sales collateral for a half-million-dollar deals (and I have), I start with the best content I can find and adapt it for that deal. I would never pull a wrinkled flyer that I’d written for some other deal out of my bag and expect it to do anything but get me disqualified.

As it should.

Customize, customize, customize

Even for a $50,000 sale, I’d work to customize it.

Your resume is a piece of collateral that speaks for you and speaks to the job (sales) opportunity that you’re facing.

The summary at the top of your resume is usually the second most important bit of collateral that you’ll use.

The first most important is a cover letter, customized for that opportunity, and the person to whom you are sending it.

My rule for cover letters is the same: use it to help you stand out from the crowd.

Avoid cliches like the plague.

Copy pasting a good summary from your resume isn’t a bad idea if you don’t have a better one.

The goal of the cover letter, after all, is to get them to read the resume. The goal of the resume is to get them to talk to you.

Telling them in the cover letter that you’re applying for the job as whatever that they’ve posted on their website is usually dumb. Do you think they can’t figure that out if you don’t tell them?

Maybe you’re sending it to the HR department, and you want to make clear what job you have in mind. Sending stuff to the HR department is another category of dumb. Find the hiring manager and send it to them.

Hard to find the hiring manager? You’re making a half-million-dollar sale. Do a little work!

Telling them that you’ve enclosed (or attached) a resume likewise. Do you think they won’t find it if you don’t tell them?

Tell them something that improves the odds that they’ll read your resume.

“Tom Brown, your classmate at Brown and a friend of mine gave me your name and said that he thought we should talk.”

Final thoughts

There’s more to writing a resume than just crafting the summary.

Choose the highlights in your job history for impact and pick the ones that will help you land the job you’re after.

One last point.

Proofread, and spell check and grammar check and then have someone who you know is careful, read your cover letter, and resume.

One stupid error in a resume tells me that however bright you might think you are, you’re an idiot.

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To get better answers, ask better questions

This morning, in a forum that I subscribe to, someone asked this question: “Can anyone help me understand why Portland is so crazy?”

The forum is invitation only. It’s a small group of people self-selected for intelligence and rationality. In two days, there were 26 responses, some snarky, a few thoughtful. A couple edged up to questioning the question itself.

Is Portland crazy?

Portland is a city of 650,000. On-the-ground reports say that 3,000 to 6,500 people typically march, sing, chant, and speechify—peacefully.

Less than much smaller number—1% according to most estimates—engage in acts that might be judged crazy.

So there might be some crazy people. But is Portland crazy?

Here’s a city with 99% of its people going about their business, and about 1% not. About 0.01% are doing what amounts to poking a powerful animal in the tail with a stick to see what happens. You might call it crazy. You might call it foolhardy. They likely call themselves “brave.”

But the rest? I

Is it crazy to show up, walk around and chant for a few hours? Hard to see that it is.

Another person in the forum asks:

So, being situated in Scandinavialand, I’m a bit perplexed with the whole Portland situation. What do the rioters want with that courthouse and why are there police/soldiers (or what ever they are) holed up inside it

I couldn’t answer that question without understanding what the writer means by “the rioters.”

He might be referring to the people who would describe themselves as “protestors” or “demonstrators.”

Or to that tiny minority engaged in provocation or vandalism—most of whom are unlikely to self-describe as rioters.

He might be following this kind of reasoning:

When an authoritative source declares that an assembly, formed for protesting, is a riot, all the protestors stop being protestors and become rioters.

Seems odd to me.

What do “they,” whoever “they are,” want?

Here again, we run into a bad question.

The who are there want different things.

There might be subgroups who want similar things.

If you wanted to know what the protestors want, they want to protest. Some want to protest against police brutality. Some want to protest the presence of the Feds. Some are protesting the perceived indifference to the problems black people experience.

If there were rioters there, I could guess that they’re there to riot.

These are well-intentioned questions, but not particularly good ones.

Can I think of a better question?

Richard Feynman says, “I’d rather have questions I can’t answer, than answers I can’t question.”

So here’s a question that I’m asking myself:

How could I—far away from Portland—make things better?

I don’t have an answer yet, but I have some ideas.

Stay tuned.

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