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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Masochism and misbehavior

We know masochism exists.

Some masochists are driven to physically painful experiences. Some are driven to psychologically painful experiences.

Masochists don’t smile and laugh as they experience pain or degradation. They seem as troubled as anyone. Yet they keep coming back for more,

Why?

Short of brain damage, how can a person become—and remain—a masochist?

To a neuron, reinforcement is reward,

We know that a person’s behavior is the result of both conscious and unconscious drives.

For a neural subsystem, ‘reward’ is simply ‘reinforcement.’ ‘Pleasurable feelings’ are a conscious experience. Reward by reinforcement is an unconscious phenomenon.

We could imagine “constructing a masochist” by rewiring a brain. We’d need to build an unconscious module that drove the organism toward painful experiences. We’d wire the pain sensors to that module so that pain would reinforce that behavior. We’d leave everything else alone. The pain sensors would be connected to the modules that produce avoidance behavior. And they’d be connected to the modules that produce the feelings of pain.

We would have constructed a creature that consciously feels pain, strives to avoid it, and yet unconsciously is driven toward that which it wants to avoid.

Normal alignment

Usually, ‘reinforcement,’ ‘reward,’ and ‘pleasure’ are aligned. But they don’t have to be.

Neurons don’t care about pleasure or pain, reward, or penalty. The only thing that matters is reinforcement.

Neuron firing is values-neutral.

A person can become a masochist if unconscious drivers of behavior that lead to pain are more potent than the conscious drivers that avoid it.

For a masochist, pain still hurts. But the brains of masochists still drives them to painful experiences, because reinforcement, not “reward,” is what drives behavior.

Adult misbehavior

Adults misbehave.

We do things that we know that we don’t want to do and that we know that we will regret the next day.

In extreme cases, the behavior is disruptive and dysfunctional—like drinking or drug-taking.

In the usual case, it’s mild: we spend more time than on social media than we want, or we eat things that we’ve decided that we don’t want to eat.

Adult misbehavior is driven by the same mechanism that drives the behavior of masochists: reinforcement of neural structures that are decoupled from consciousness.

The drive doesn’t have to be not legible or intelligible. In the end, it’s a bunch of neurons that can influence behavior and that have been trained to push behavior in a particular direction. Plus, another bunch of neurons that reinforce the behavior.

How does it happen?

Every life history is different. The mechanism is common, but the ways in which it can become activated are varied. When the issues are large enough, people seek therapy. When they are small, we learn to live with our deficiencies.

Misbehaving children

This theory explains the misbehavior of children.

It says that if a child is misbehaving, there are neural structures in that child’s brain that are driving that behavior. The neural structures are being reinforced by the consequences of that behavior.

Parents are confused. They’re doing everything that they can to discourage the behavior. The substantial cost of their disapproval should be enough to offset the small pleasure a child might get from its misbehavior.

And yet the behavior persists.

Remember, to a neural structure, reinforcement is reward.

If the child’s brain has gotten wired so that the parent’s disapproval reinforces the misbehavior, the child’s behavior will persist. The more disapproval, the more reinforcement.

How could that happen?

Every history is different. It’s hard to know. But if the behavior persists, there must be something reinforcing it.The challenge is discovering what it is and finding a way to avoid reinforcing.

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ADYB: Always Doing Your Best

When I was growing up, the people around me told me that I was not doing my best. My mom, the major force in my life as a child, told me that a lot.

She not only told me that I was not doing my best, she told me why I was not doing my best.

She told me I was lazy. I was selfish. Defiant. Ungrateful. That I did not care. Or I did not try hard enough.

I came to believe those things.

I have no doubt that my mom and the other people who told me those things loved me.

I have no doubt that they believed that they were telling me that for my own good. (They told me that, too)

I told shit like that to my kids, also for their own good.

I’d like to believe I did less harm to them than my mom did to me. She did me a lot of good, but also harm.

But who knows. I believe she was doing her best, as I did.

(Sorry, kids, I know better now.)

What I now believe

I now believe that I am always doing my best. Right now.

I believe I have always done my best.

I believe that my kids always did their best.

I believe everyone does their best.

Of course, “the best” does not mean “the best possible.” It means “the best, subject to the constraints of reality and your .”

That’s what I believe everyone does.

All the time.

I believe no one can do anything other than their best.

I hope to bring you to understand that it’s true.

I hope to bring you to believe that realizing it is true will make a difference.

I hope to bring you to understand why we came to believe what we did and that it’s harmful, and how to be free of those harms.

Does it matter?

Let me start by describing the difference between the two approaches: the Always Doing Your Best (ADYB) approach and the Not Doing Your Best (NDYB) approach.

Imagine that you’ve been convinced that ADYB is true, and someone is doing their best.

Imagine that you’d still like them to do better.

(The fact that someone is doing their best now doesn’t mean that they can’t do better in the future)

What can you do that will help?

Anger and punishment will help

Seriously. They sometimes will cause someone to do better. You’ve seen it. You’ve probably lived it.

This is part of why we’re convinced it’s effective.

Anger and threats of punishment work for a different reason than you might think and have costs you might not consider.

Remember, under the ADYB assumption, they were doing their best before you got mad. The best that they could under the circumstances of reality at that time.

So how did they do better?

The answer is: you’ve changed the circumstances. Before, their best might have been meeting their own goals—whatever they were.

Now their best includes avoiding your anger or your threatened punishment. So they trade satisfaction of their own goals against the threat.

It works, sometimes. But nothing comes for free.

I sometimes did better when my Mom threatened me or got angry at me. Or when teachers, or bosses, or customers did.

And I sometimes did better when I threatened or got angry at myself.

I did do better, but not always. But always there were costs. Depending on the situation, the costs included one or more of these, in greater or smaller amounts: frustration, shame, depression, bitterness, anger, hostility.

I did the best that I could do to avoid anger and threatened punishment—not to do the best job I could.

I’ve used that approach with others—notably my kids. They’ve undoubtedly benefitted, as I did, and undoubtedly paid a similar price.

And as the active agent, I paid the price, making those threats and making good on them.

I’m sorry for not knowing better, but like my parents, I was doing my best.

I’ve gotten over the harms I’ve experienced, but it took time, and there was a cost to do that.

Better not to have paid the cost of the process and the cost of repair.

Removing constraints will help

Uner the ADYB assumption, people do their subject to constraints and other conditions of the environment.

If you want them to do better, you change the constraints or other conditions.

Ignorance is a constraint that’s often easy to change.

Little kids do stupid things despite ADYB because they don’t know better. So we teach them.

When they appear to be defiant, under ADYB, it’s because they don’t understand something. So we teach them.

When grown-ups appear to not do their best, it’s usually due to a lack of knowledge. So we teach them.

But what?

You first must determine what they don’t know, or misunderstand, or are unaware of. Then you provide them with the knowledge that will remedy their lack. Then, when they do their best, they will do better.

Someone’s lack of knowledge might be immediately obvious, or it might take some inquiry. If it’s not obvious, then you lack knowledge, and you need to remedy that.

It might be easy to teach someone what they don’t know, or it might be difficult. (Or you might be teaching them the wrong thing)

If it’s difficult, the ADYB framework says that you are doing your best to teach them (given your own constraints), and they are doing their best to learn (given theirs.)

So if things are going poorly, more inquiry—with the recognition that you are both doing your best—will ultimately get to the root of the problem and lead to success.

That’s the theory.

The difference between the two approaches

Both work. In both cases, you’re trying to help someone. The reason that you are angry or making threats is to help.

If you’re trying to help someone, you’ll do your best to learn what they need and then teach them what you’ve learned.

A person can teach and learn even if they are upset, frustrated, angry.

But there’s ample evidence that in most cases, teaching and learning go faster in the presence of patience, calm and caring.

Not always. Navy SEAL training would probably not be as effective with patience, calm, and caring. But that’s the exception.

Fallback

You don’t need to believe the ADYB theory to consider these two approaches: anger and upset versus patience and calm.

Anger and upset work—sometimes. The costs—outside of SEAL training and the like—are resentment, fear, and hostility.

Patience and calm also work. The costs—in general—are only time. It takes less time to threaten someone to do better (when it works) than to patiently find out what they need to learn and then teach them.

So consider: even if you don’t believe the ADYB model is correct, you might help someone do their best if you behaved as though you believed they were already doing their best.

I’ll explain why we are convinced that people are not always doing their best and why NDYB seems obviously true in a follow-up post.

In the meantime, why not act as if ADYB is true?

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Down the rabbit hole

Is anyone interested in taking a trip down a rabbit hole with me?

The journey started with a paper by physicist Lev Vaidman called All is Ψ.

It started before that, but never mind. I’m going through the paper making notes. If you want edit access, let me know.

Now, here’s the story.

From ACIM to All is Ψ

I was reading A Course in Miracles (ACIM) with its grand, metaphorical visions of the universe, God, and humanity.

The thought arose: “I wonder if there’s anything written about the Universal Wave Function that would help me understand and communicate these ideas?”

(Where did that thought come from? We’ll get back to that later.)

Anyhow.

I knew that the Universal Wave Function was tied to Hugh Everett’s Many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics.

I Googled for papers and found a paper by Vaidman. I remembered (correctly, it turns out) that Vaidman had invented something that I remembered (incorrectly) as the Vaidman bomb detector. It’s actually called the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester. (I do seem to be losing it.)

The bomb tester was originally a thought experiment for a device that you could use to determine whether a bomb with a one-photon-trigger would explode when hit with a photon, or would be a dud.

How do you run such a test?

Vaidman figured it out.

The good news: the device would never give you a false positive. If it said a bomb was a dud, it would be a dud. The bad news: the design would trigger half the bombs, yield no result for a quarter, but it would tell you, correctly, that the remaining quarter were live bombs.

The theory was confirmed experimentally. Improved versions were designed and tested. The current designs give no false positives, correctly detect close to 100% of all live bombs and explode almost none of them.

Think about that for a minute.

You have a bomb that goes off if a single photon hits it. You want to see if it’s a live bomb without triggering it. How the hell do you do that?

Answer: quantum weirdness and human genius.

I knew Lev Vaidman was a genius and expected his paper on the Universal Wave Function was worth reading.

Understanding the paper

I pulled a copy of the paper, turned it into a Google Doc, and started reading.

Vaidman starts:

I believe the quantum state is a reality. It is the reality. The only fundamental physical ontology is the quantum wave function.

“The only fundamental physical ontology” translates to “The only fundamental thing that actually exists.” A bold claim, but Mikey likes it.

Later:

I will present the view that all that exists is the wave function of the Universe, which evolves according to the Schrödinger equation and without collapses during quantum measurements.

This is the fundamental premise of Everett’s Many World’s Interpretation.

Then:

The theory postulates that the only ontology is this Wave Function, which evolves in a unitary way…

Evolves in a unitary way?

Down the rabbit hole

So I go to find out what “evolves in a unitary way” means.

To do that I need to understand Unitary transformation (quantum_mechanics)) and to do that I have to understand the Hamiltonian (quantum mechanics)) and to do that I have to understand Hamiltonian mechanics and to do that I need to understand this sentence:

A Hamiltonian system may be understood as a fiber bundle E over time R, with the fibers Et, t ∈ R, being the position space. The Lagrangian is thus a function on the jet bundle J over E; taking the fiberwise Legendre transform of the Lagrangian produces a function on the dual bundle over time whose fiber at t is the cotangent space T∗Et, which comes equipped with a natural symplectic form, and this latter function is the Hamiltonian. The correspondence between Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics is achieved with the tautological one-form.

Right?

But I really want to understand Vaidman’s paper, because I want to understand the Universal Wave Function.

Why?

Theory of the UWF

In case I die before I finish this research, here’s a sketch of where I am going.

1. Suppose that Vaidman is right, and reality is the wave function.

2. Since the UWF is all that is real, the UFW contains all the energy and all the matter there will be or has ever been.

3. One of the fundamental ideas (well tested) of physics is that information cannot be destroyed. Even when information gets sucked into a black hole, it can’t be destroyed.

4. So the UWF contains all the information that has ever been or ever will be.

5. Since knowledge is a kind of information, the UWF also includes all the knowledge there has ever been or has ever will be. (Knowledge can exist without a knower)

6. If the universe is a mathematical object, as described by Max Tegmark in “Our Mathematical Universe” (not just described by mathematics, but a mathematical object) that object can be self-referential. It is not possible for an ordinary physical object to be genuinely self-referential. The internal model must be less precise than the outer model. But it is possible for a mathematical system to refer to itself with full fidelity.

7. So the knowledge contained within the UWF is complete knowledge of the internal self-reference. Is that the same as saying the UWF has knowledge of itself? It might be. Is that the same as saying the UWF knows itself? It might be. Is that the same as saying the UWF is conscious? It might be.

8. If the UWF is conscious, then the UWF is also omnipotent and omniscient. It’s a pretty good approximation of the idea of God. Not God as defined by holy scripture, but God as implied by quantum physics.

9. If this is true, would the UWF “want” anything? Does a bacterium want to move? Does a bird want to feed its young? Does a ball want to roll downhill? They do those things. But do they want to? Does “wanting to” matter?

10. The behavioral implications of that idea are very much in line with those of A Course in Miracles.

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What I do, I teach

What I do, I teach

A while ago I wrote about making (a request for miracles and discovering A course in miracles

I started reading the coursebook and doing the lessons—one lesson a day for 365 days. Then I got distracted, at about lesson 10.

Recently I went back to it and started reading it more regularly and thoughtfully. I plan to restart the course soon.

But I’ve learned some worthwhile lessons from it already.

Here are two:

• What we teach, we learn
• What we do, we teach.

What we teach, we learn

I’ve known that for a while.

The old school rule for medical training: see one, do one, teach one.

There’s no better way to learn something than to teach it to others.

That’s part of why I write.

By putting something that I’ve learned (or half-learned) in a teachable format, I force myself to clarify my understanding and eliminate my misunderstandings so that I share knowledge, not ignorance.

What we do we, teach

The second is obvious, but I’ve never thought about it the way that the book reminds me.

Humans are hard-wired to mimic the people around them. It’s one of the two ways that babies learn. One is reward and punishment (the environment punishes, even if parents don’t.) The other is imitation.

We know this happens both on the neurological level and behavioral level.

Humans understand the emotional states of others by unconscious mimicry. We copy the facial expressions we see and then read our body language. If the process is interrupted by drugs or paralysis or otherwise, ability drops measurably.

So everyone, all the time, intentionally or unintentionally, is teaching everyone around them by what they do.

What do I teach?

That prompts me to ask: “Who am I teaching? What am I teaching? What do I want to teach?”

Alone in my house, as I am right now, I’m only teaching Future Me. Whatever I do, I teach myself.

A while ago, I wrote one of my favorite posts, Thank you random stranger in which I explained how I’d revised my attitude toward my past and future selves.

I decided to be grateful for what Past Me had given me instead of resentful; for what I hadn’t been given. (Thank you, again, Past Me). And I decided to improve what I’d been given and pay it forward.

But the idea that “What I do, I teach” tells me that I can do more than that.

What do I want to teach Future Me?

Here’s an example.

On my kitchen counter, I have a sheet of paper with my task list. I’ve been making progress on the list, but there are some tasks that I put off day after day.

Because I’m a procrastinator.

I have been accepting that explanation. And I’ve been accepting that behavior. Accepting it is better than beating myself up for it—which I’ve done from time to time.

But with new knowledge, I can do better.

I’m have been willing to do procrastination.

Now that I know I’ve been teaching it, I’m not willing to keep teaching it.

And I don’t want to keep learning it.

What do we teach ourselves?

We are always teaching ourselves. It’s called reinforcement. Every time we perform a behavior that we’ve learned, we strengthen the neural connections for that behavior. We are teaching ourselves to do that same thing, more skillfully, with less effort.

Sometimes procrastination is rationally a good idea. Some problems go away by themselves. But most of the things I procrastinate doing will not go away.

So I’d like to teach myself to get those things done and not procrastinate.

I know that’s what I’d like to learn.

Why did I start?

So why did I start to procrastinate?

And why haven’t I stopped?

The answer to why I started must be this: I was taught to procrastinate, and when if I inadvertently procrastinated, I was rewarded. So I started.

And then I taught myself to procrastinate more often by practicing procrastination and being rewarded. I got good at it.

What I do, I teach.## Why haven’t I stopped?

If I don’t like procrastination (at least sometimes), why haven’t I stopped?

When I do a task that I’ve put off repeatedly, I may be relieved when I finally do it and get it done, but there’s little joy in it.

Most often, I start because someone or something has forced me. It may have been circumstances, or some nagging other, or my nagging self.

But in every case, I am forced. And I don’t like it.

Whatever else I might feel when I overcome procrastination, my feelings also include resentment.

When I am the one who changes my behavior, I’m at war with myself. One part of me is sick and tired of procrastination, and sick and tired of the parts of me that are procrastinating.

But other parts have been well-rewarded for procrastinating, want to keep doing it and resent being forced to stop.

The part of my mind that makes me stop procrastinating uses force, and guilt, and hostility to overcome the other part.

The other part responds with resentment.

What I do to overcome procrastination I teach

What I do, I teach.

I have overcome moments of procrastination with force, and guilt, and hostility, and to respond with resentment.

And that’s what I’ve taught myself to do next time.

Fuck all of that. (And the NYTs, besides)

What I intend to teach

I want to teach Future Me to have a better life than the one that Past Me passed on to me.

I want to teach Present Me, as well.

So instead of forcing myself NOT to do something that I’ve learned to do (and done well and been successful at doing), I intend to teach myself to do what I would aspire to learn.

Bobbi and I think that our kids are better than we were, and we believe that’s because we taught them the best that we knew (and hid our worst teachings, when we could.)

We did not just tell them what was right, we modeled the behavior for them. What we did, we taught.

We both were hard-working—and taught them to be hard working. And at least one of us (hint: not me) taught them to be organized and not procrastinate. And they learned.

TL;DR

What I do, I teach

What I teach, I learn.

Let’s see what I do with that, and what I learn.

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