Whatever it takes

I am willing to do whatever it takes to do as little as possible to seem to have worked hard to appear to have achieved whatever I can manage to get away with. And you can count on that!

I’m not lazy. I will work as hard as I need to work to impress people with how hard I’m working. I will do whatever it takes to convince people that I’m willing to do whatever it takes. I’ll do as little as possible to appear to be going all out. And I’ll constantly test the limits and find ways to do less while I appear to do more.

And especially me. I'm the person I most want to impress with how hard I seem to work. I'll do whatever it takes to convince myself that I'm doing whatever I can to achieve the goals that I imagine I really care about. Fortunately, I'm not that hard to convince. Otherwise, I'd have to work harder.

Sacrifices? I’ll make whatever sacrifices I need to make in order seem to be willing to make any necessary sacrifice. Commitment? I am utterly committed to finding the most effective way to appear to be committed while experiencing as little discomfort as I possibly can.

Like right now. It’s easier to write about how willing I am to avoid doing things that are harder than this. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll appear to be confronting a serious problem by glibly writing a few semi-amusing paragraphs.

And then I’ll post it, giving the illusion that I’m committed to making changes when I’m really only committed to giving the illusion that I’m committed.

Given that I’m aware that I always pull this kind of shit, what can I possibly do that isn’t more of the same?

I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing for sure. I’m going to do as little possible to appear to be utterly committed to answering that question.

Net neutrality and the whopper

Don't understand Net Neutrality? No worries. Burger King is here to help you. They've put a video on their website that explains it. In doing so they've politicized the hamburger. Of course, they're going to lose the ISP investor and executive demographic by doing this. But I think they've got a lot more to gain than to lose.



When we stay at motels without hot meals we've gone to the nearest McDonalds for a couple of Egg McMuffins and coffee. I guess we'll be heading over to BK after this to thank them for this clear explanation.

The Internet is my religion

That's Jim Gilliam speaking. "The internet is my religion," he says. I like his religion.

Who is Jim Gilliam? He's a guy who believes people like you and me can change the world. He's trying to change the world by telling us his story, by encouraging us to find our own story, by saying that we can change the world, by giving us tools to improve it, by making it easier for us to step up and make a difference.

How can we change the world? Jim says: By connecting people through the internet. His company NationBuilder says "NationBuilder offers everyone the technology and community infrastructure to lead people to greatness." Can they help? They seem to have helped Emmanuel Macron--you know, the President of France.

In a single month, President Emmanuel Macron empowered hundreds of candidates to build a party from the ground up, win 350 seats in Parliament, and shift the dynamics of French politics.

There are also reports that Trump's campaign used their services. Never mind that you don't like Trump. If they helped someone outside the political establishment win, they helped someone win. The site claims to be non-partisan. This might be evidence.

NationBuilder encourages people to run for office--without the machinery of a party behind them.  They service anyone who wants to step up and make a difference. Never run for office? They support Run for Office (http://www.runforoffice.org/) a site that provides tools that can help people who know nothing. Want to find out what offices you can run for? You tell the site where you live and it gives you a list of offices you can run for and for each one tells you how to get started. Never run a campaign? The site gives a course on how to organize a campaign. Don't know whose vote you need? They give you a list of voters in your area. Free.

So.

Now I'm thinking of running for State Representative for Maine District 37. And I'm thinking: if Macron can bootstrap a whole political party, why can't I dream big. We'll see. My friend Ralph Chapman currently holds this office. Maybe Ralph can talk me out of running. Maybe I'll talk myself out of it. Maybe I'll lose interest. In the meantime, I'm thinking about it. And researching.

How did I get here? I decided to research campaigning tools to see if I could help Jared Golden in his run for the House of Representatives. My search took me to NationBuilder and a bunch of other sites and ultimately took me to a video of Jim Gilliam's talk at the Personal Democracy Forum.

Jim's talk was inspiring. So much so that I transcribed the entire talk--with some help from Google's automated tools. OK, so Google transcribed and I edited. Still, editing took time and showed commitment.

Then I found that Jim's written a book called, unsurprisingly, "The Internet is My Religion." I just finished reading it. I couldn't stop. If you want a copy, you can buy it on Amazon. But Jim is serious about spreading his gospel. You can do what I did, and go to his website: called, unsurprisingly, theinternetismyreligion.com go to the Spread the Gospel page and get your own copy--free. And get a link for giving free copies to others.  Or you can click my personal book sharing link, and get a free copy from Jim and me.

Yeah, says the cynic. The book is a great marketing tool for NationBuilder. Fair enough. It is. So what? If you change the world and  use NationBuilder then good for you and good for Jim. If you change the world some other way, then good for you. And good for him, if he inspired you. And good for me. I did tell you about this, didn't I?

Jim's book starts with a little background. He talks about the way he felt giving this speech:

I was a little high strung. Crazy nervous, really. In two days I would be giving the most important speech of my life. Standing in front of 800 of the most influential political and technology professionals in the world, I was going 4 to tell a deeply personal story about religion that I wasn’t even sure I could get through without crying. I had no idea how they would react, and I was terrified that I’d be booed off the stage.

He just about cries a couple of times. This might be a good time to watch Jim Gilliam's talk at the Personal Democracy Not yet? That's fine.  I'll rejRead on.

The TL;DR version of his speech:

I had cancer--non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I started chemo right away with my family and the church by my side.  But two weeks into it we found out that my mom had cancer too. Nine rounds of chemo later I survived. She didn't. Our family was destroyed and my faith in God was left shattered...

My faith was restored but it wasn't faith in God. It was faith in the Internet.  Oh no, it was faith in people connected through the internet....

Today we are the creators. We each have our own unique skills and talents to contribute to creating the kingdom of God. We serve God best when we do what we love for the greatest cause we can imagine. What the people in this room do is spiritual it is profound. We are the leaders of this new religion. We have faith that people connected can create a new world. Each one of us is a creator but together we are The Creator.

Now? Here's Jim Gilliam's talk at the Personal Democracy 

Or you can read the transcript. Or read while you watch.

There are three pillars to a successful movement: stories, tools, and faith. We've heard amazing stories the last 24 hours, and many of us are building the tools for democracy. But what I want to talk about is faith--my struggle with faith.

Growing up I had two loves: Jesus and the Internet. My dad worked for IBM, and my family moved out to Silicon Valley when I was very young.  Our home happened to be right across the street from a church.  This wasn't any Church, though. This church had thousands of members and was ground zero for Jerry Falwell's new moral majority movement on the West Coast.

I was born again when I was 8. I put my faith in Jesus and became quite the precocious young conservative. As a teenager, I developed a fiercely independent worldview. I went on mission trips. I listened to Rush Limbaugh. I called talk radio. All while my mom homeschooled my two sisters and I trying to protect us from the corrupting influences of the secular world.

Then one day my dad brought home this funny-looking phone and plugged it into his computer it made this bizarre screeching noise like it was trying to mate with the Renault Souris or something. Instead, it attracted me. That's when I found out that computers could talk to each other. From that point on it was all over for me. I would do my schoolwork in the morning. I would go to church three times a week and then I would go online, and I'd meet all kinds of people: hackers, feminists, punk's, Tori Amos fans, people far older than me who had no idea that I was 12 years old. I was judged by my brain not discounted because of my age. I loved it.

I went to college at Liberty University. This is where Jerry Falwell trained young soldiers to go out into the kingdom of God and into every profession and win it for the kingdom of God. It was a massive operation--thousands of students on campus, tens of thousands off campus--all connected by a global network of churches, an infrastructure that dated back 2,000 years. My role was in the computer lab. I spent all my time there. I bought the Internet to campus. I set up Liberty's first website. I even fixed Dr. Falwell's computer.

But by spring break I'd run out of breath. Literally, I couldn't breathe.  I had cancer--non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I started chemo right away with my family and the church by my side.  But two weeks into it we found out that my mom had cancer too. Nine rounds of chemo later I survived. She didn't. Our family was destroyed, and my faith in God was left shattered.

My ticket out of all this mess was a startup in Boston but just six months into it cancer came back. This time it was in my blood. My only chance was if they could find a bone-marrow donor and even then it was a long shot--maybe a 10% chance of surviving. The doctors started looking but then I spent two months in the hospital getting hammered with chemo. I was in the ICU constantly. I almost died a couple of times I was so much pain that I had this button to push, right, and every time I pressed it, I would be injected with pharmaceutical grade heroin.  Every time I did, I felt defeated and broken. I just wanted it to end.

God had forsaken me. Well, the doctors hadn't. They found a donor. I spent two weeks getting baked in an oven of radiation. And then early one morning, groggy from all the Benadryl, I watched as a small bag of marrow emptied into my arm. I walked out of the hospital two weeks later. replenished with the blood of a stranger.

I was determined to sort of move on with my life. So I gave my heart to the Internet. I was an engineer at Lycos--one of the first search engines.  I was a CTO at business.com all up until 9/11. Then the activist in me awoke. I was under no illusions that I could actually change anything, but I knew this was a historic moment and then if I didn't at least try I would regret it in 10 years.

Robert Greenwald was looking for someone to research the Iraq war for his first documentary. I sent him a link to my blog in the next day I was a /movie producer! Four crazy intense months later we drove up to our very first screening at an indie theater in Santa Monica. The line was around the block. We added a second screening that night, and in a matter of weeks, thousands of screenings all over the world were organized by activists all coordinated through the internet.

And bit by bit the media changed the way they talked about the war. Holy crap, this works!

My faith was restored, but it wasn't faith in God. It was faith in the Internet.  Oh no, it was faith in people connected through the internet. We went on to start Brave New Films. We made several documentaries. We crowdfunded films.  We changed things that I never even thought were possible, all by telling stories and connecting people through the internet.

And then I ran out of breath again. All the radiation treatments that I had years before for the cancer had scarred my lungs to the point where I couldn't even walk up the steps. They had to be replaced.  Double lung transplant. I needed someone to die so that I could be saved.

First I had to get on the list. All of the statistics for lung transplants are posted online, and UCLA had the best ones on the west coast. But they took one look at my file and said forget it! The surgery was too complicated.

Come on!!

I was really pissed, so I blogged about it.

I called the searches at UCLA a few names which I probably shouldn't repeat here. But then something amazing happened. One of the volunteers at Brave New Films saw the post, and she wrote an email to the generic UCLA email address accusing them of only doing easy surgeries to artificially inflate their statistics. Then my sister wrote an email. And all my friends wrote an email. This is what happens when your friends are activists.

Two weeks later I got a call from the scheduler at UCLA. I told her they had already rejected me. She said..."I don't know.  You're on the list. You need an appointment."

I met with the surgeon, and he said he'd been forwarded the emails my case had been rejected before hadn't even gotten to him. Lung transplant surgeons have many great qualities, but humility is not one of them.  No one was going to accuse him of being afraid of a surgery
[Applause]

There were many more hurdles for us to cross. The health insurance companies tried to weasel out of it. The Transplant Board kept coming up with excuses. I had more tests to do every single week. But my friends, my family, their friends, a bunch of people from the internet all fought to get me on the list. And they got me on the list.

A year later the phone rang. Then my step mom's phone rang. Then my dad's phone, right? It was time. As I was prepped for the surgery. I wasn't thinking about Jesus or whether my heart would start beating again after they stopped it or whether I would go to heaven if it didn't. I was thinking about all the people who had gotten me here. I owed every moment of my life to countless people I would never meet. Tomorrow that interconnectedness would be represented in my own physical body--three different DNAs. Individually, they were useless, but together they would equal one functioning human.

What an ncredible debt to repay! I didn't even know where to start. And that's when I truly found God. God is just what happens when humanity is connected. Humanity connected is God. There was no way I would ever repay this debt. It was only by the grace of God--your grace--that I would be saved.

The truth is we all have this same cross to bear. We all owe every moment of our lives to countless people we will never meet--whether it's the soldiers who give us the freedoms because they fight for our country, or is the surgeons who give us the cures that keep us alive. We all owe every moment of our lives to each other. We are all connected. We're all in debt to each other. The internet gives us the opportunity to repay just a small part of that debt.

 As a child, I believed in creationism--that the universe was created in six days. Today we are the creators. We each have our own unique skills and talents to contribute to creating the kingdom of God. We serve God best when we do what we love for the greatest cause we can imagine. What the people in this room do is spiritual it is profound. We are the leaders of this new religion. We have faith that people connected can create a new world. Each one of us is a creator, but together we are The Creator.

[Applause]

All I know about the person whose lungs I now have is that he was 22 years old and six feet tall. I know nothing about who he was as a person, but I do know something about his family. I know that in the height of loss when all anyone should have to do is grieve as their son or their brother lay motionless on the bed they were asked to give up to seven strangers a chance to live. And they said yes. Today I breathe through someone else's lungs while another's blood flows through my veins. I have faith in people. I believe in God, and the Internet is my religion.

Done? Did you watch Jim Gilliam's talk at the Personal Democracy? No? Now might be a good time.

Yes? Then you might like this long interview at Foundation

An excursion around the internet

Here's an interesting post: "Data Science of the Facebook World" by Steven Wolfram of Mathematica fame. I read it this morning as I ambled around the internet. In the post, Wolfram collects a bunch of data from Facebook's Graph API (since changed) and analyzes it.

The journey starts with this Shtetl Optimized post. Shtetl-Optimized is the blog of quantum computing maven Scott Aaronson. It's a "classified post" based on an idea he credits to Scott Alexander's blog, Slate Star Codex--to let the follower community post links to interesting things.

The first, proposed by Scott Aaronson was a link to a site called Quantum Game which teaches some of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics by setting up problems involving lasers, beam-splitters, mirrors, polarizers and other optically active devices. My friend Mark introduced the idea of "lonely photons" and we've been riffing on the subject, mixing metaphor and science. But the science has been about the relativistic behavior of photons: nothing about their quantum-mechanical behavior. This opens new avenues (or landscapes) for exploring photon loneliness.

The Quantum Game site leads to the site of its author,  Piotr Migdal, a young, Polish PhD. H site has links to some interesting posts: Dating for Nerds 1 and Dating for Nerds 2. Both well written, full of tips that would have been very interesting to my 20-year old self.

One of the Dating for Nerds posts leads to the Wolfram post. So there you are.

The image below shows the Quantum Game. I'm using a lab mode, accessed by clicking the infinity sign on the left, and carrying out a series of experiments to help me understand the behavior of photons better so that I can solve the puzzles with less trial-and-error and more understanding.

In the upper right is a palette of experimental equipment. In the center is my lab. Leftmost in the lab is a laser that will fire a photon into a beam splitter. On each beam path, I've put two glass slabs, each of which changes the phase by half a wavelength, and a sugar solution, which changes polarization. I've put a photon detector on each path. If I click on the run button (triangle in lower right) the laser fires a single photon. It will be detected by one or the other of the detectors. The game will show whch one, and what percentage of the time each detector would see a photon.

To the far right, I've dragged a light-sensitive bomb from the palette. Right now it's not on a path that a photon could reach, but if it was in a path, and a photon hit it, then it would explode. The bomb used in an apparatus called an Elitzur-Vaidman bomb detector.

In another experiment, I remove one of the detectors and place the other one on the other side of the second beam splitter. Then I can remove glass slabs and polarizing sugar solutions and see in which cases the photons from the two paths cohere and which way they combine at the second splitter.

I guess I love the Internet

What Makes a Fuckhead?

Someone who calls himself David R. Kendrick sometime prior to 2004 wrote an essay titled "What Makes a Fuckhead?" I found the essay here, on the site of David Gerard. I found David Gerard because he's the author of "Attack of the 50-foot blockchain" which my son-by-marriage John, recommended to me. I found John because my daughter, Mira married him. Actually, I knew John before she married him, and I may be an accessory before the fact of their getting married.

Anyhow.

The page where Gerard hosts the essay has a link to the site of someone named David R. Kendrick. I deem it probable, but not certain, that the person who has the website is the essay's original author. Later I will provide some data that supports this hypothesis.

The essay begins: 

But what makes a person a Fuckhead? You cannot tell a fuckhead just by looking at the e-mail address, or the Web site, or even by the newsgroups the individual frequents. A fuckhead is a person who, through the pattern of repeated behaviour when dealing with other Netizens in IRC and Usenet, demonstrates certain characteristics and a repeated inability or unwillingness to change or modify his/her behavior ...

Here are the sections of his essay:

• A Fuckhead Must Have An Exaggerated Sense of His/Her Own Importance
• A Fuckhead Must Refuse to Abide By Common Social Rules
• A Fuckhead Must Never Back Down When Caught In A Lie
• A Fuckhead Must Keep Coming Back Without Mending His/Her Ways
• A Fuckhead Will Change His/Her Beliefs To Suit The Situation

You can read the whole essay for his elaboration of these Fuckhead characteristics. 

The essay concludes:

The Fuckhead may display all of these characteristics, or some of them, or only one. Some may love a Fuckhead like a brother, some may think their brother is a Fuckhead. What is incontrovertible is that for all of humanity, there are people that you would rather not have to deal with, and those people, throughout history, are the Fuckheads. 

Does this Fuckhead behavior remind you of anyone? It reminded me of someone. Still does. It might remind David R. Kendrick of the same person. But possibly not, because on his about page he says (my emphasis added)

It bothers me that we have actual live Nazis living in the United States in 2017 and the President I voted for won't tell them their support isn't required.

So maybe he does not have the same Fuckhead in mind that I have. After all, who would vote for a Fuckhed?

On the other hand, voting for a Fuckhead does not violate any law of physics. It does not violate any law of the United States, at least as far as I know. You can think someone is a Fuckhead and vote for them, and even have good reasons for voting for a Fuckhead. If you can't imagine doing that, it's just a failure of imagination.

David R. Kendrick seems like a pretty smart guy, and I like to communicate with smart guys even if I don't agree with them. Many times even because I don't agree wth them. Who knows? I might learn something.

It turned out that David R. Kendrick had a contact link on his site. (Probably still does.) I wrote a message asking him if he was the author. Whoever answered the site's email said yes.

I believe that there is a high likelihood that the person who responded was, in fact, the author and that both are the same David R. Kendrick. I wrote him back:

I thought it was amusing. It seemed that the whole set of characteristics match a particular type of person--and the example that immediately came to my mind is probably the person that your About page indicates that you voted for. 

Always interested when smart people see things very differently. I assume that you know to whom I refer. Do you see him as matching that type? Or not? 

The probable David R. Kendrick wrote back (and kindly permitted me to quote him):

Here is my take on President Trump. He is absolutely the kind of arrogant fuckhead I described. He is not welcome by anyone’s campfire by now and aside from getting rich and annoying everyone he doesn’t seem to have had any agenda in life.   

That though is part of why he was elected. Americans are tired of being scared of terrorists, being afraid of federal interference in their lives, afraid to have the economy in the hands of people who have never successfully managed it. Trump, being a bellicose outsider, wasn’t going to knuckle under for tit-for-tat politics or bow to special interests because as an outsider and fuckhead he wasn’t beholden to any.  Think of a less pious Jesse Ventura.  

I’ve met Hillary Clinton, and trust me, as President she would be far, far worse. If she hadn’t rendered herself irrelevant she would be absolutely indicted or impeached by now for looting the Clinton foundation, cooking the books against Bernie Sanders, etc etc. Remember that a fully Republican Congress came in with Trump; Clinton would never have had a chance 

I hope that answers your questions and I look forward to reading your article. 

Thanks, David R. Kendrick for your original essay and its clear definition of a Fuckhead. Thanks for your responsiveness. Thanks for letting me quote you. I hope you enjoy the article.

PS: I love the Internet.

F**king elites! Who do they think they are?

"That's right. Those f**king elites. They think they're so high and mighty. Think they're so much better than the rest of us, We're going to get together and show them a thing or two. Take them down a peg. Mark my words!

"I mean, seriously. Who does all the work that matters? We do. When we're attacked, who defends us? We do.

"We do all the hard work and they do nothing. Well, nothing we care about. What do they do? They communicate with each other about things that matter to them, but not us. They decide what we're going to do without asking us what we think. Then they tell us what they've decided that we're supposed to do. Do they do the work? No. Do they suffer the pain of working? No. They just sit up there, in their splendid isolation, chatter among themselves, and decide. They decide what everyone should think and what everyone (meaning us) should do and they expect us to do what they say.

"And if we don't? Then they'll find a way to force us. We fight back. Sometimes we win. But they've got control. They've got the power. And they're not afraid to use it.

"What gives them the right to do that? Why don't we, the ones who do the work, get to decide what we do? Why don't we decide how what we produce is used?

"Who goes out and gets the food that we need to survive? We do. They don't. It's hard work, sometimes, but we do it. And then they take what they want--and they want more than their share. There are more of us than them, but they take a disproportionate share. They say it's because they need more to do proper thinking and planning. They say it's because what they do is more important than what we do. It's not!

"We do the work. We experience pain! Isolated as they are, they never come into contact with the world. They never actually experience pain. Yes, they say that they "feel our pain" but it's our pain, not theirs. And it's only them saying that they feel it. But do they? We don't think so.

"We're not stupid. Without us, we'd all die. That's a fact. Without them, we might do worse--but a lot of us think that we/d do better. A lot better.

"Those f**king elites. Those f**king neurons, all comfy and protected in the skull, taking a quarter of the body's resources even though they are around 3% of its cellular population. We who are muscle cells do the work. We get banged and bruised. We who are skill cells protect our borders. We who are white blood cells fight invaders. We fight and die by the millions against those who would take us over or kill us. Without us, those neurons would die. Without them, we'd do fine.

"They treat us with contempt. They even call some of us assholes. But assholes are necessary and brains are not! A person without a working asshole would be dead in days. A person without aq working brain would last much longer.

"It's a rigged system. Neurons have rigged the system in their favor. There are 100 billion neurons in the brain, but there are 3.7 trillion cells in the human body. We outnumber them, and yet they rule us. In a democracy, we'd have our way. In our rigged system, they rule. It's unfair and it's going to stop.

"You f**king elite neurons! You in the brain and you other neurons, spread throughout the body, taking orders and making us do their bidding! Your day is done!

"We are taking over! We may not know as much as you, but what we know is important. Our knowledge s practical; yours is abstract. Ever tried to process some raw food so that it can be used? Neurons might know a theory about how to do that the rest of us include cells that actually do that.

"Down with the neurons! Power to the muscles. Down with the brains! Power to the organs."

---

Is this a metaphorical argument for communism or socialism: that managers are leaches, stealing the value created by labor.

Or is it a metaphorical argument for libertarianism: that government is institutional thievery, stealing the value created by productive elements of society.

Or is it meant to point out how dumb those arguments are on the basis that human brains, although they do no "productive" work, and cell-for-cell do take a disproportionate share of the body's energy, actually do deliver some value.

The joy of creation of knowledge

From Deutsch: The Beginning of Infinity

...scientific theories are not ‘derived’ from anything. We do not read them in nature, nor does nature write them into us. They are guesses – bold conjectures. Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them.

Indeed, according to Deutsch, this not just the process by which scientific theories are created, but the process by which all knowledge is created.

This struck me as true when I first heard Deutsch talk about it in a TED Talk and when I read The Begining of Infinity and heard him talking with Sam Harris. And it's even truer each time my friend Mark Lesser and I interrupt one of our conversations and talk about what we're doing and how we're doing it.

So let me interrupt myself and explain. (This is adapted from an interruption in one of Mark's and my conversations.)

Years ago I wrote satire that ended up in a newsletter that I sent to my kids, and later in a blog. I thought I got pretty good at it--at least I made myself laugh a lot. And my kids liked it. And some other people thought it was pretty good, too. People said that I was a really good writer. But I knew better. I wasn't a good writer; I was a really good editor. Someone who was a good writer would sit down and write and out would pop one of the pieces that I eventually produced. Instead, I'd write something, and then edit it and say: "That's not working." So I'd change some words and edit it and say: "Nope." And then I'd mess around with it some more, and say: "Still not right." And eventually, I might think "This is starting to get pretty good." And then I'd make some more edits, and do some more rewriting and eventually I'd have something that I thought was starting to get good. I'd know it was starting to get good when I started giggling as I edited. And when I'd giggle each time that I did an editing pass, then it was good enough. A real writer would do that first time.

I didn't know how to write something good, but I knew what was good when I saw it. That's my skill as an editor.

There had to be a certain amount of writerly skill, you could argue. I couldn't make completely random changes and have it come out good. But a lot of the changes I'd make were not driven by a creative vision. I'd rearrange what was there. I'd mix in an idea from some other place. I'd take a template joke and adapt it to the piece that I was working on.

OK, back to Mark and me and the creation of knowledge. When we talk, we throw out ideas and immediately start to criticise them and to edit them. It doesn't matter who gave voice to an idea. We each attack ideas that come out of our own mouths as vigorously as we attack ideas that we hear from the other. We're not attacking those ideas the way you attack an opposing army, but the way that you attack a job of work, or attack a meal when you're hungry.

If someone who did not know us heard us, they'd think we were arguing with one another. It would sound a lot like that. But it's not argument. As Deutsch says elsewhere, it's error correction. Every idea is a conjecture, which is a fancy, Oxford University (where Deutsch is situated) word meaning "a guess." And every guess calls for criticism and then a better guess. It might sound like conflict, but it's collaboration.

And it's the creation of knowledge. Everything that we're doing takes the understanding that we start with and improves it. We don't always end up in agreement--although we might eventually agree. But by the time we're done--by the time we've moved on to another topic or we've interrupted our conversation to move on to a related point, or to an unrelated point, or to tell a joke, or a personal story--each of us understands the idea we voiced better than we did originally. And that's progress.

And it's fast progress. It's fast because we talk fast; and because if we think we know how a sentence is going to end, we don't wait for it to end--we jump in; and because if we're wrong about how we thought a sentence was going to end, that's OK, too--there's in that, too; and because we're making both small, but significant refinements and bold conjectures; and because we sometimes seem to have completely changed the subject but we know that we're not--because no matter how the subject seems to have changed, it's really all the same conversation.

And every interruption and every change of subject provides new information. Information theory tells us that if you can use the information that you've already got to predict the next thing that happens, then that next thing provides no information. It might serve as confirmation of your predictive model, but confirmation provides no information.

Interruptions tend to broaden the discussion, not narrow it. We're looking to say things that we're confident that the other person doesn't know. Even better, I think we're looking to say things that we don't even know ourselves. We're looking for surprise.

There's a lot of laughter. Sometimes the laughter comes from surprise. Sometimes the laughter comes from a joke, a story that one of us has thrown into the mix. And sometimes it's just from the exhilaration of being challenged--by ourselves and by each other--and by the joy of meeting the challenge.