For example, 3 countries, with 3 cities:
USA - New York, LA, Chicago
Japan - Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto
Russia - Moscow, St Petersburg, Vladivostok

It is weirdly, weirdly sticky. Even a year later, I still find myself looking at maps and going “better commit a few cities to memory for this game”. One of the few things of this type that successfully worms itself into my brain.

It’s a questionable way to spend my time, but I spent a whole day working on it and resulted in an 8x8, which I’m pretty proud of.

A couple months after being introduced to the game, I introduced it to some friends, and they also got nerd-sniped on it. As people came around and asked what was going on, one friend explained that it was “the h-index for countries and cities”.

Ohh this is a thing!1

Where h-index is for academia, indicating the number of papers published that also has the number of citations, is a nifty metric for intuiting a researcher’s productivity and proliferate-ness.

Generalized, however, the idea becomes a useful metric to many things and I subsequently got nerd-sniped by this instead. The concept, while a bit unwieldy in everyday speech, becomes really useful for exploring and evaluating many things that I previously had trouble with.

It, for instance, somewhat resolves a conundrum I’ve long had on the question of “How many languages do you know?”

Every so often, this subject comes up, and my way of explaining has weird, awkward caveats:
“Uh, depending on how you count it. 3.5 or 4, I suppose, but half fluent on 2 of the 4, maybe? Depending on your definition of fluency.”

It feels like such an unsatisfying representation of fluency. What does it mean to know a language? It’s like asking: “Do you Know math?” What does that even mean?! So much needs to be assumed, while so little can be assumed. n I’m obviously being a bit stubborn on precision here. The standard response for both questions is really just “I know 3 or 4 languages and no, I’m not very good at math.”

There can be a lot more objective pinning-down of how many languages we know here by using the h-index. As in, we qualify and agree on the constraint of what parts of the total graph (all languages we know any amount of) counts for the purpose of this question.

For example, how many languages, n, you know for which you also know n words in that language? Which, for me, might be around 9. n Sometimes, writing a post is about flexing random knowledge you have.

Alternatively, a more telling one for the purpose of “knowing a language”: how many languages, n, you know for which you can also have 10*n minutes of conversations with a native speaker of that language?

For this version, I can then, satisfyingly, say 4. I feel like I finally can answer a question that properly satisfy me in conveying how many languages I know without over or under-selling what I know. Sweet, sweet precision!

Each variation also then gives different usefulness and insights. For example, while the latter is satisfying for how I want to address the question of how many languages I know, the former of knowing n words in n languages is a rough measure of how many other other cultures a person is likely minimally familiar with.

This is so neat!!

“Answers” are always constrained by the “Question”. Gaining new forms of asking questions allow us to touch answers that are invisibly constrained by the past ways of asking questions.

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Here is now a random assortment of ideas that I thought are neat and would find interesting asking others:

• First, in the “how much math do you know” question, perhaps something like how many concepts in math, n, can you talk to a random audience for n hours on. This really helpfully pins down someone’s relationship to it, especially if/when the other person is likely to wriggle out of answering questions like this out of a weird kind of humility. Think the math genius at school that says they did poorly on a test and get a 96 or the former math phd who almost-confidently say they are not good at math.

• How many concepts in any subject, n, for which you can talk for n hours about. This generalizes the above point for many, but not all, subjects.

• How many countries, n, have you visited for which you have also visited n cities in those countries? None of that “Uh, I’ve been to the airport, does that count?” 😤

• how many locations where you have significant lived-in memory: You’ve lived in N buildings. Rate each on a 1-N meaningfulness scale. What is the largest k such that at least k buildings are rated ≥ k? Sorry, convoluted, but helps represent something meaningful for me as someone who’s moved around a lot.

• Simpler, how many cities, n, you’ve lived in for which you can give a tour of n buildings/neighborhoods in that city. Cities are [tall]! Simply visiting one is very different than knowing the nooks and crannies.

• How many friends, n, for which you also know n of their friends? As a measure of how extensively connected one’s social network is.

• Or a variation, how many people n do you love, for which you also love n people in their lives? As a measure of one’s commitment to another person’s world, rather than just them as an isolated individual.

• How many books (or shows), n, do you know, for which you can quote n lines out of? As a measure of how media like books has had significant imprint.

• Or probably a better variation to the above, how many movies (books, or other media), n, for which you have watched/read n times.

• How many people, n, have you dated for which you have gone on n dates? As a measure of notable romantic encounters.

• How many relationships, n, for which you have had n significant challenging incidents. Knowing this would tell me a lot about a person, contingent on how “significantly challenging incident” is defined.

• Super meta: How many “h-indices games”, n, for which you have played n rounds in. 😅

How would you use this frame to question things? What would be your answers to them?

It’s the dragons you see. Specifically how it’s highlighted, celebrated, and talked about.

While it’s true the dragon image is central in Chinese mythology, somehow it’s not quite “supposed to” be presented this way. This way being the “Dragon Warrior”, the great heroic role oddly filled by the panda protagonist, is a talked about, celebrated, and crucially imitable and desirable role.

There are two lines of mythological meaning dragons can follow, both divine. One is that of gods and one is that of emperors. Both can be talked about and celebrated. However, they most certainly are not imitable and desirable.

Here, we conflate divine-as-good with divine-as-desirable. We often think of desirable and undesirable as wanting or not wanting. Here, un-imitable is a hint. It’s not that you wouldn’t want to desire it, it’s more that you wouldn’t think to desire it. We are unable to desire it, thus un-desirable. Would a young French peasant go around yelling they would like to be the King of France? Alternatively, just because Roman emperors wore imperial purple, does it mean it’d become haute couture and discussed among the masses? Either of these counts as treason if tried, but more importantly, it wouldn’t be tried under normal circumstances. Just because it’s good, doesn’t mean you can or should have it. This is true for emperors and for gods, that is not our place. It is not the order of things.

“How very American to want good things for oneself” says a stereotypically Chinese accented wise-man in my head.

Dragons, then, particularly in the emperor’s case, while honored and celebrated, are as talked about as the imperial purple would likely be. So exclusive and entangled with its meaning that it goes without saying. Purple is Roman Emperor as Dragon is the Chinese Emperor. You wouldn’t assume one without the other. This would also mean any depiction of the dragon is to depict the emperor, and you better have authority to depict, otherwise, again, treason. For this reason, depictions of dragons is actually, simultaneously and generally, rare and prolific. Over-adornment actually becomes a form of defacing and devaluing.

Dragons, in the gods case, becomes complicated for me. “Wait, how are they depicted again?”

I notice that it’s one of those areas that, like the dragon imagery in general, feels so fused with the background that it easily and subtly separates those who know and those who don’t. Personally, I love learning about things that tends to live in the it-goes-without-saying realms of things. I thought I’d do my duty and give my bastardized, immigrated-as-a-child, version of Chinese Mythology.1

For any characters/names, I recommend a google image search to get vibes.

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So. Dragons.

My first completion of the query of “how are dragons depicted again?” came out to be The East Sea Dragon King (东海龙王). The ruler of the east sea (surprise, surprise). I know him only as a side character in a number of other key myths, that of Ne Zha (we’ll be returning to him) and also the original owner of the Jingu-Staff that Sun Wukong (oh we’ll come back to him) uses. His abilities include watching over(?) the Jingu-Staff but is actually known as the Pillar That Anchors The Ocean (定海神针). I don’t remember what happens when Sun Wukong took the staff (the staff can grow and shrink you see, that’s why it can be used as a weapon by a monkey-monk-warrior-god), presumably the ocean was no longer anchored. Oh and he made it literally rain, with I think the other dragon kings, in at least one depiction from a show, by spitting.

Remembering the East Sea Dragon King made me remember the entire government of gods. It acted as a convenient gate way to the Chinese Mythology canon.

You see, the gods operate entirely as a mirror to the imperial system in the human realm. There is the Jade Emperor (玉皇大帝) (and his wife the Queen Mother (王母娘娘)) and an entire parliament of ministers responsible for the running of the world. East Sea Dragon King, then, is then, the local governor of his domain with some role-specific responsibilities (like rainfall). In his domain, he has total authority, except for that which is mandated by imperial authority. I remember a story snippet of the Dragon King panicking that he’s missed the scheduled rain time and amount for the region, because that’s mandated. Same as virtually any other function of the natural world. For example, when you die, you go to the underworld, ruled by, the Hades-equivalent, king of the underworld (阎魔王). He is depicted as literally an imperial government minister who is responsible for the paperwork that determines how much/long the punishment and what one is to be reincarnated along a ladder of desirable reincarnations – it’s pretty good to be a human.2 That said, quite literally, you report to something like the DMV after you die, which I have not made that connection until now.

Yes, literally in heaven, on earth, and in hell, there is one constant – Bureaucracy.

Except, while funny, I think this reduces away something core about the values of the mythology here. It’s not bureaucracy quite bureaucracy as much as it’s Order.

Order for everything, underwriting everything. All things move accordingly, under the tightest control/management one can imagine – the imperial government.

Bureaucracy as the expression of Order is an interesting reflection of just how deep Legalism as a school of thought popularized and implemented around the Qin Dynasty, 2300 years ago. The first “unification” of China in history, one of the largest civilization to exist at the time could not get by without good bureaucratic administration.

With this, we set the backdrop of most mythological events. Heroes born and die, tragedies and comedies are written, lovers are united and separated, but all under the global order of the imperial heavens, not to be disturbed without the universe collapsing.

While significant pieces of mythology often features the imperial court’s cast, like the emperor, they are rarely the main characters. In fact, I’m not aware of any stories that focuses on the emperor as a protagonist. Stories often resolves around characters’ lives within the cosmic order. After all, why would you write about the development of a constant? However, the setting is essential as context for understanding any individual piece of mythology, because the heavy hand of Order is often an invisible character, framing the contours and driving the progression of narratives.

For example, the Valentine’s equivalent on July 7 (lunar calendar) called Qixi (七夕), is about two lovers, mortal man and low-class goddess, that were forced to separate by the queen mother – because, order, remember – and are allowed to meet once a year on that date as they moved the heavens with their love.

However, there are also creation myths in Chinese Mythology and its connection to how the imperial court in heaven formed is ... not clear to me. It certainly wasn’t always so and always will be. We have described the present, let’s describe the beginning.

Creation Myths, in fragments.

Man, I don’t have a good grasp on the creation myths. Chinese mythology broadly feels like a collection of a large bunch of stories in a loosely shared universe. After all, many of these stories are told, in different mediums, mutating and crossing over with each other until it stitches a big weird fabric of meaning over a good number of millenia.

Here I will give 4 fragments I recall.

A myth explaining how we see what we see.

Starting with the Valentine’s example. It’s said that when the Queen Mother separated the lovers, she drew the Milky Way (the word galaxy is 银河 or silver river) as a river between them so they can never cross it (a different god or someone took mercy and allowed the once a year meeting – preserving order while creating life in fringe is a theme). The two lovers are represented by two stars in the night sky, separated by the milky way.3

A myth explaining how the world came about.

The most fundamental one, which is the Creation Goddess Nvwa (女娲) created the earth, made humans with mud, and fixed the sky with a colorful rock... Yeah, I’m sure some readers would immediately know what I’m saying, but details are fuzzy for me. In the imagery in my head, she’s depicted as a loving Goddess that is entangled closely with Good. Culturally, it’s interesting to note that a fairly patriarchal society that is China fundamentally has a creation Goddess, rather than a god.

A myth both about how the world came about and why we see what we see.

Uhh, there once was 10 suns you see. As one can imagine, it was very, existentially-threateningly, hot.

A hero named HouYi (后羿) was like “Nah” and took a great bow and shot down 9 of the suns. That’s why we see one sun today. ☀️

I remember liking this story and it being more exciting, but also lacking details here.

A myth about our civilization.

As seems the case for all ancient, lasting civilizations, like how Leonidas (real) claims a lineage back to Hercules (myth) or the first Pharaoh, or Jesus, or Buddha (some mix of real/myth). Chinese mythology also blend the more far back we go in time. My understanding here is that earliest record of Chinese dynasty was Xia, some 4,000 years ago, of which the Wise-King Yu (heh) was able to save the country from a cataclysmic flood (known as 大禹治水). The story here has mythological status. No idea on the flood’s accuracy. However, it doesn’t start there. Even before the Xia Dynasty has those that come before, of which there is HuangDi (Yellow Emperor 黄帝, confusingly different for child me as Emperor, 皇帝, which is pronounced the same). I believe this guy “Created Civilization”? There were a few others that I infer from the saying 3 kings and 5 emperors (三皇五帝), but I don’t remember them. The Chinese people are literally said to be descendants of this first emperor (炎黄子孙). History and mythology simply merge.

Though just like Tolkien, only the nerds read the creation myth and would push their glasses up describing Eru Iluvatar’s will. The cool stories, like The Lord of The Rings, is how the mythology bring relevant-to-us stories into bear, illustrating to us how to live.

The Four Classics

The history and mythology blend is of especial importance because Chinese Mythology is not just stitched together by my uninformed knowledge about it, but also by the fact that it’s temporally (5,000 years) and spatially vast (Asia). Likewise, Chinese mythology weaves across its own folklore, which most of the above are about, but also Buddhism and Taoism. Through Buddhism, as well, more inter-cultural myths mixes. For example, it was a big surprise to me when I learned that the Chinese Sun Wukong and the Hindu Hanuman are likely of the same origin :o.4

Now if there were only one segment of the myths to know, overwhelmingly definitive and canon, are the Four Classics. They are so proliferate that you can not not consume them growing up in China. The stories are so woven into the lore that they are re-told, re-imagined, referenced, over and over again. By osmosis alone, we absorb segments of these stories that eventually piece together to be some functioning whole. They are more richly embedded and known than many of the stories above. Think in terms of how reference-able Shakespeare is for western audiences. Of these four classics, I will and can expand on three of the four. This is because I left China as a 10 year old boy. This is a valid reason because:

1. Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦)

It’s like about women and romance and families and stuff. I didn’t read it...5

2. Water Margins (水浒传)

Of the four classics, not counting the above, this is oddly unknown in the west. I didn’t even learn of its English name until my 20s and went “wtf is Water Margins?” It’s also the second least familiar to me. When I was around 7, I remember this was quite popular in my friend circles, but then it kind of died down or was outcompeted by the next two classics, so the memory here has faded a lot.

The story goes, I think it was in the Song dynasty, around 1000, about 108 guys on a mountain.

More properly, 108 heroes (rebels) who resisted the state and their heroism and character became notorious. The book was once banned, I’m pretty sure, in some past dynasties.

My current take is that this has a similar impact signature as what 300 did for the modern west. Specifically it gave a very rich overview of what Heroism means in the Chinese context. It fleshes out a specific notion of Heroism that to my knowledge is uniquely a Chinese concept called Xia (侠). At least, I have found great trouble conveying this in English. Loosely described, it’s sort of like a vaguely taoist vibed hero, somewhat overlapping with the romantic modern notion of the Japanese Ronin (roaming samurai doing good things). It also heavily cements this notion called Jianghu (江湖) which is even worse of a translation endeavor. Coined first in the Taoist text Zhuangzi pointing at notions around freedom. Here it roughly depicting a “romantic martial world” where heroes and villains, usually adjacent but interconnected to official imperial order, have their stories. It’s an awkward thing, because this idea is so central to Chinese mythic imagery, but has little translated equivalent. The best representation that comes to mind right now is actually the world of John Wick – a parallel society with its own rules and characters and heroes.

In Water Margins, these 108 heroes, of which maybe 30 are fleshed out(?), notably has a weaker, by martial prowess, leader, a theme that will be repeated, leads the resistance against a corrupt state. The stories highlights each characters’ distinguishing features and stories, like a very strong monk who wields this weird shovel (cooler in Chinese), or another guy who killed a tiger with his bare hands. Ultimately, the politics within the group and between the band and the state led to betrayals and collapse of the band. They all die I’m pretty sure. Not in some glorious final battle either, but rather a couple at a time, until finally the remaining dies. I remember feeling sad about this.

3. Romance of The Three Kingdom (三国演义)

Oh boy. We have entered “Even Foreigners Know About This!” territory. If the first two are considered classics, this (and the next) are dominant. It’s like the McDonalds and KFCs of the fast food world. Sure, In-N-Out, might be classic, but let’s be clear, there are two dominant players and this is one of them. Once again, mythology and history blends curiously. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the book (written 1400s) is a fictionalized tellings of actual events around 200AD, about three kingdoms that fought for control over China following the fall of the Han Dynasty. It’s relatively accurate, but the fictionalized story (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 三国演义) makes protagonist out of one particular faction, that of Liu Bei (again, a leader depicted as not exceptional, but for an ability to gather strong followers), in contrast with the historical record, Chronicles of Three Kingdoms (三国志), a different book.

The mythology of this story is so significant that one of its characters, Guan Yu, is literally worshipped as a god, of wealth and honor, with literal temples and statues.

The history mixing with mythology is also personally weird. To illustrate, within Three Kingdoms exists the most famous Strategists in Chinese history and pop culture, Zhuge Liang (诸葛亮), who happens to be my Mother’s ancestor. Yep, I’m literally the descendent of the equivalent of a mythic hero, nbd.6

The story, maybe comparable to a War and Peace in terms of scope, describes how each faction of the three kingdoms rose to prominence in the backdrop of a disintegrating dynasty with the eventual downfall of two and supremacy of the last kingdom. Notably, the main character’s faction does not win, once again filled with tragic ends and disintegration of our heroes who the narrative has built up, like that from Water Margins. Differently from war and peace though, the story and history is both advanced such that scholars are constantly commenting and analyzing it, but also distilled in many forms that children know and love it. I, for one, had surely some 100 hours talking about the story, characters, and their actual history with my mom age 10-14.

Rather than the entire narrative, individual anecdotes or events from the storyline becomes massively viral stories over the past centuries and is only more pervasive today. In fact, stories like these often forms the backdrop of how people communicate ideas in Chinese.

Allow me to illustrate the formation of Chinese idioms through mythology. There is a saying in Chinese that is 草船借箭 or to “use straw ships to borrow arrows”. The meaning is something like: when short on resources for accomplishing a goal, one can intelligently leverage resources elsewhere to do so. This is based on the famous story of Zhuge Liang using straw soldiers on ships during a fog to trick the enemy general Cao Cao (the ultimate winner of Three Kingdoms btw) to shoot arrows onto them, thereby replenishing arrows needed to further his campaign. I knew this saying as a child, because I knew the story, and reference-able by adults to annoyingly telling me to learn to solve problems better.

Other famous stories are incredibly plenty, and is better looked into further independently. In part because I think they are great stories better told by my poor memory, but even more so because there are just so many media on it, in as many digestible forms as you can imagine. It is after all, public domain.

Here are some english videos that gives some overview:

I recommend perusing the visual representation here, as the imagery of Three Kingdom is generally so set, that for many characters, there are set, distinguished features. Think how Excalibur and Arthur are tied together or Merlin’s wizard looks.

3. Journey To The West (西游记)

Last of the four classics, and as big as Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West. Insofar as the previous three has a naturally historic presentation, this is straightforward fairy tale. Up until recently, arguably less known in the west, but maybe single handedly changed as a result of the game, Black Myth Wukong.

Set during the Tang dynasty, around 700, but written in 1600s – though I remember reading that the 1600s version is really the first time many of these stories told over a long time in oral and written records were collected together to form a whole. It’s based on a Chinese Buddhist Monk Xuanzang (Tripitaka is the more well known western name) and his travels to obtain buddhist scriptures from India. Except in this story, Tripitaka is accompanied by three demons (uh, the good kind... or at least, decided to be good instead of bad), a monkey (Wukong), a pig (Pigsy), and a man-eating monster (Sandy) and a dragon that transforms to a horse.7 For the record, I abhor the English names. In chinese, they respectively are usually called, Realize Emptiness (Wukong, 悟空), Eight Renunciations (八戒), and Realize Purity (沙悟净), too bad it just doesn’t translate well. The three demons are Tripitaka’s buddhist disciples, charged by Guanyin (Buddhist Goddess, 观音) to protect him on this trip, that they may then also become buddhists themselves. Along the way, the disciples protect their master whenever other demons tries to eat Tripitaka (which would give them immortality). This mostly looks like rescuing their master after they kidnap him, often with help from local deities – yet again, the main leader being personally weak but acting as moral center. Unlike the past two classics, this story ends with the group successfully reaching the west (India) and obtaining scriptures to bring back to China to help its people flourish.

I don’t know where this effect came from and how intentional this was in original tellings, but by one means or another, Sun Wukong/Monkey King, the main disciple of Tripitaka, is disproportionately the protagonist of the entire narrative. His origin story (born from a rock, as one does), relationships, and personal development is more richly highlighted and memorable than anyone else in the band and is comparable, if not exceeds, in popularity to any of the Three Kingdom’s top stories.

It is also in Wukong’s stories, that our familiar mythological backdrop finally makes a proper return. The most notable stories of Journey to The West are of his origin, the prologue to the journey. Havoc in Heaven (大闹天宫), where Wukong rebels against the heavenly imperial court after taking the Anchor of the Sea, AKA jingu-staff (金箍棒), as his weapon, because the Dragon King wasn’t happy about that. Also he ate forbidden peaches that makes him a god of some kind and that was not kosher with the gods. As he fought the entire army of the Jade Emperor, the Jade Emperor also asked help from Lao Tzu (lmao yep I double checked this to make sure) to cook Wukong into an elixir (this feels less violent in Chinese) but it was unsuccessful. Ultimately, having given the imperial court a lot of trouble, Buddha showed up and defeated Wukong by entombing him in a mountain made from Buddha’s hand for 500 years, when Tripitaka arrived and begun their journey.8

Writing this out, I notice that this reads a lot like weird fan fiction. Like “and then Harry Potter shows up and decides to defeat Luke Skywalker with Superman.” Somehow it’s more understandable when its fan fiction written over millenia, cultures trying to incorporate new elements to make stories coherent and sensible.

It’s also interesting that Journey to the West contains a lot of political themes that I didn’t notice until much older. In order to make characters from different universes coherent, the Jade Emperor and Buddha is presented as peers, leaders of different political factions, and they have to negotiate power between each other. All this, once again, just the backdrop of the main story, where the band defeats enemies in cool ways.

Like Three Kingdoms, media illustrations are beyond abundant. Though, compared to Three Kingdoms, Journey tends to be more children-facing.

Like Three Kingdoms, I recommend perusing the internet for imageries, the central cast is smaller than Three Kingdoms, so more digestible. Similarly, here’s accented cinema again, helpfully putting together resources better than I hope to:

Honorable mentions that also seem essentially part of the canon to me

Investiture of the Gods (had no idea this was the English name until now, 封神榜

Like Journey to the West, it’s supposedly published in 1600s, but is likely a collection and ordering of folktales, some much older. It acts as a compendium (often in the form of stories) of many of the gods and demons of Chinese mythologies. At least in some strict sense of mythology, this is probably more significant than the first three classics listed above. It includes cross-overs, like Ne Zha, being featured both here and in Journey to the West. It contains many famous characters, but unfortunately, I’m basically unable to recall any in detail. The main one that I still recall is about a retelling of an emperor in one of the earlier dynasties, Xia or Shang, who was bewitched by a fox demon, and that’s how that dynasty fell apart. While lesser known, it’s influence is far. Within China, the highest earning movie is now Ne Zha 2, a re-imagining/re-telling of Ne Zha’s story. Alongside Havoc in Heaven, was also a classic animation that was Ne Zha Conquers the Sea (哪吒闹海), the two most well known Chinese animations in early modern China. Internationally, it’s influence is subtler, but no less far reaching; images like the Nine-Tail Fox originates from here.

Mulan 花木兰

Arguably, without Disney, this would probably just be a slightly obscure story in Chinese mythology. I honestly don’t even know if I would know Mulan, growing up in China, if not for Disney. I remember watching the Disney movie in China growing up. I also vaguely recall reading many stories independent of the movie, but would those stories be presented to me if not for Disney’s influence already being there? No idea. I was also surprised to learn much later that it was based in a poem from the 400s period – though I’m not sure where I thought it would have otherwise came from. I find the poem itself especially beautiful.

Four Sacred Beasts 四圣兽

There is also one last myth I can think of where the Dragon shows up. Specifically that within Chinese mythology, there exists four sacred beasts – no idea how these relates to the other fragments/stories here. Specifically the Azure Dragon (青龙), Vermillion Bird/Phoenix (朱雀), White Tiger (白虎), and XuanWu/TurtleSnake(?) (玄武). I know they are associated with cardinal directions and guardians of each or something. For me though, my primary associations with them are Beyblade’s four main characters lol.

Jin Yong’s Novels

As far as I can tell, basically the Tolkien of China. Guy basically modernized and popularized the notions of heroism (Xia/侠) as presently exists in China with a series of novels in 50s and 60s. His works are reproduced in TV, movies, and comics, at the same rate as the Classics. Nearly all present day Chinese martial fiction follow a particular aesthetic and to my knowledge, he basically invented this through his works, including Western adaptations of Cultivation Fictions. The idea of martial sects vying for control of the martial world with its distinct flavor of romance (Jianghu/江湖) was not a proliferate thing prior to his works. Incredibly enough, his (and his contemporaries’ works) also arguably revived and created a new Kung Fu craze in modern China. The Shaolin’s depiction of martial prowess, while existed prior to and independently of this type of work, is heavily popularized as a result of this kind of fiction granting it mythic status. Similarly so for Taichi and Qigong (depicted as the Taoist sects). Interestingly in his fictional universe, one of the most powerful martial techniques is the 18 Palms of Dragon Subduing; a reflection of the Dragon also moving into modernity in China’s own depictions, I think.

So, Dragons?

Just as how (western) depictions of Dragons and western fantasy in general are really popular in East Asia too, cultures interpenetrate and new mutations of depictions are formed.

The very notion of a “Dragon Warrior” from Kung Fu Panda would probably be bizarre for Chinese peasants a century ago. Insofar as people had a notion of Kung Fu, it had little associations of Dragons. At least, probably not more differentiated from the Tiger style or Crane style or Mantis, Monkey, or Viper – the 5 heroes in Kung Fu Panda.

My understanding of where dragon got popularized in the west, especially in association with Kungfu, was in fact, Bruce Lee or 李小龙 (meaning Lee, little dragon, but not his original name). Bruce clearly loved dragon as a theme, with two of five of his movies being Enter the Dragon and The Way Of The Dragon. The cultural impact of Bruce Lee is hard to understate, with Everybody Was Kungfu Fighting out in 1974, right when Bruce Lee was at his heights, and apparently leading to Black Americans having a huge Kung Fu craze over the period. Meanwhile, Bruce’s successors (and contemporaries like Leung Siu Lung (梁小龙), same name as different surname) was heavily influenced and followed his example, notably Jackie Chan or 成龙 (literally: become dragon), also not his original name, continues to bind Dragon and Martial Arts together tighter and tighter, impressing on the creators of Kung Fu Panda to eventually make Kung Fu Panda.

Remarkably, Kung Fu Panda was received exceptionally well by Chinese audiences, influencing the emergent mythology of present day Chinese mythology as well.

I think writing this for me serves three purposes. One, the Chinese mythological canon is one of those not that talked about or well known, yet influential contextual backdrop to how Chinese sense making happens. Order, for instance is an inescapable theme that overarches all narratives, notably with all the rebellions, few are ever quite depicted as successful, for better or for worse. These overarching themes can be easy to miss. Like probabilities for a quant trader, you are more likely to hear about how markets can give information but not probabilistic frameworks that underpins the whole thing, because that’s assumed. Two, a lot of Chinese media are derivatives from works like these, especially that of Three Kingdoms and Journey to The West. By these stories being assumed to be common knowledge, much of these works, even if amazing, simply can’t be appreciated because they are about manipulating the existing, well-known tropes in the original stories.

Third, and more personal to me, so much of my personal memories, meaning, and nostalgia is locked behind a set of media that is incredibly obvious to some, yet exceedingly obscure to others. I wish to shorten the inferential distance on why Three Kingdoms models for me how projects sometimes fail or how Jin Yong novels acts as aesthetic anchors for Confucius or Taoist ideas, how A Chinese Odyssey (大话西游) captures something about love so well or why Nobodies (浪浪山小妖怪) hits me so hard. Illuminating the backdrop helps me make ground for referencing and connecting more of the things I love.

Reality is in the relating, in the activity-between. Subject and object are equally important and... reality is in the relating of these, is in the endless evolving of these relatings. For objectivity alone is not reality. Where then is reality? In the objective situation, or in ‘the people’? In neither, but in that relating which frees and integrates and creates…

There is no use chasing through the universe for a ‘real’ you or a ‘real’ me; it is more useful to study our interactions, these are certainly real.

Organism and environment do not ‘express’ but make wholes. Every advance in physics, physiology and psychology shows us life as process. And this is a creating process. [creating occurs] with reciprocal influence [in the] evolving situation.

The emergent pattern, the complex emergent whole, that is formed by the interacting, the relating, of the constituent factors.

These three – the interacting, the unifying, and the emerging – are not parts of a process in the sense of steps in a process. There is one simultaneous process, and these three are aspects of that process.

… functional relating has always a plus value... A dynamic psychology gives us instead of equivalents, ‘plusvalents’... These are the ‘novelties’ in the psychologist’s ‘critical’ moments of evolution. Progressive experience on every level means the creating of plusvalents. The doctrine of circular or integrative behavior that gives us hints of that mystery moment which leads from the existing to the new, shows us a progressive experience, the way of individual and social development.

The value of every fact depends on its position in the whole world-process, is bound up in its multitudinous relations... a fact out of relation is not a fact... You cannot arbitrarily keep distinct that which is not distinct. Experience is unitary.

It is not a reduction, a simplification, it is the urge to embrace more and more, it is a reaching out, a seeking, it is the furthest possible conception of pluralism, it is pluralism spiritually not materially conceived. Not the ‘reduction’ to unity but the expansion towards unity is the social process. That is, the expanding process and the unifying process are the same.

Professor Whitehead, with his conception of an organism as a structure of activities that are. continually evolving, had got ‘nearer the heart of the truth of this matter than anyone has yet’.

[To accommodate potentiality in social life, one out to always use William James’] the ‘trailing and’ argument to prove that we can never have a unified state, that there is always something which never gets included. I should use it to prove that we can and must have a unifying state, that this ‘and’ is the very unifying principle. The ‘trailing and’ is the deepest truth of psychology... The ‘trailing and’ is man’s task for ever and ever – to drag in more spirit, more knowledge, more harmony.

The process must be emphasized rather than product, that the process is continuous, and that the making of wholes and the breaking of wholes are equally important. There are not, as some systems of philosophy imply, two principles of the universe, that of fixity and that of flux, there are – ‘progressive integrations’.

There is no result of process but only a moment in process. The most important thing to remember about unity is that there is no such thing. There is only unifying. You cannot get unity and expect it to last a day – for even five minutes... Yet a mistake we often tend to make is that the world stands still while we are going through a certain adjustment. And it does not. Facts change, we must keep up with the facts; keeping up with the facts changes the facts. In other words, the process of adjustment changes the things to be adjusted... The legal order today is telling us that precedents are to be interpreted in the light of events always in flux.

The doctrine of circular response involved in the theory of integration gives us creative experience. But the theory of creative experience given to us by the most profound philosophy throughout the ages, and now so happily strengthened by recent research in several fields, show that the individual can create without ‘transcending.’ He expresses, brings into manifestation, powers which are the powers of the universe and thereby those forces which is himself helping to create, those which exist in and by and through him, are ever more ready to respond, and so Life expands and deepens; fulfills and at the same moment makes possible larger fulfillment.

This is reality for man: the unifying of differings.

Through circular response we are creating each other all the time... The relation between whole and parts is one of circular response.

I never react to you but to you-plus-me; or to be more accurate, it is I-plus-you reacting to you-plus-me. ‘I’ can never influence ‘you’ because you have already influenced me; that is, in the very process of meeting, by the very process of meeting, we both become something different.

It is I-plus-theinterweaving-between-you-and-me meeting you-plus-the-interweaving-between-you-and-me, etc, etc.

How can we do away with this artificial separation which is the dry-rot of our life? First we must realize that each has something to give... Let us seek then those bonds which unite us with every other life. Then do we find reality, only in union, never in isolation.

Our outlook is narrowed, our chances of success are largely diminished, when our thinking is constrained with the limits of an either-or situation. We should never allow ourselves to be bullied by an either-or.

Integrative experience is always progressive experience... ignore the part of disintegration... yet disruption is only a part of that total life process to which, in its more comprehensive aspect, we may give the name integration.

Only integration really stabilizes. But by stabilization I do not mean anything stationary. Nothing ever stays put. I mean only that that particular conflict is settled and the next occurs on a higher level.

When we have really acquired the dynamic habit of mind which we boast of now, and think always in terms of process, we shall think of both organism and environment, individual and situation, as activities. What might be called the evolving situation.

Each of these essential parts is the tap from an infinite supply – in every man lives an infinite possibility.

[There are] inexhaustible resources of life, in the fresh powers constantly springing up. The test of the vitality of any experience is its power to unite into a living, generating activity its self yielding differences. We seek a richly diversified experience where every difference strengthens and reinforces the other. Through the interpenetrating of spirit and spirit, differences are conserved, accentuated and reconciled in the greater life which is the issue.

Wholeness is an irresistible force compelling every member. This is the process of life, always unifying through the interpenetration of the Many–Oneness an infinite goal.

This is, probably, an acquired taste. I certainly don’t remember being fond of libraries (or even books, for that matter) when I was a child. The older I got though, the more I came to love it.

There’s great intimacy in being able to peer into the minds, worlds, and experiences of someone by looking at the books on their shelves.

There’s also great wonder in the vast, yet distinctly finite, nature of a “tall” library. This is to contrast the infinite-ness of the internet that somewhat overwhelms before I even begin.

There’s also something about physical libraries in particular that is especially poignant, visceral. As far as I can tell, reading with physical pages in one’s hands and reading by listening or reading by screen are all distinct (but obviously closely related) mental activities.

Recently, I had the distinct privilege and pleasure of visiting a rather unique library. It wasn’t particularly large, but it was exceedingly old. Some of us have probably seen this type of library, books alluding to tomes lining a well put together library, indicating great intellectual sophistication and depth, except fake in the form of a wallpaper or simply empty book shells made for a staging shot on Zillow:

Except this one is real. The tomes are real, ancient books with actual words inside.

By ancient, I mean, the oldest books on the shelves are sixteenth-century. That’s the 1500s. That’s older than many nation states that exists today. Shelves and shelves of books from the 1600 - 1900s, and what’s incredible is:

I get to actually read them.

These heirlooms that could only be seen in a museum behind glass, I could take them off the shelves and peruse with my grubby, and hopefully sufficiently respectful, paws.

Granted, of some of the oldest, reading is… a bit of a stretch.

Other times, even if it’s a language I have a little familiarity with, doesn’t mean I can make much headway into substance.

Though fortunately, many, and I do mean many, are on par to the best of Fantasy via the fascinating glimpses into times and perspectives past.

Some can be quite whimsical.

Others, greatly informative in subtle and curious ways.

Yet others still, can give us great perspective in contemplation and reflection.

As well, without need for leaping perspectives, simply come together in shared inquriy that our forefathers have also wondered before us.

While I was enraptured in reading, I also had the mind to consider the fates of these books. There’s quite a tension between the eagerness of:

and the nervousness of did-I-just-bend-the-spine-too-much:

On the one hand, these books are heirlooms — meant to be preserved well, well into the future. On the other hand, it feels tragic to think they might never be read again. I may be one of the last people ever to touch some of them, and that thought makes me sad. A good book is one that has passed through many loving hands and curious minds.

While it was a unique privilege for me to read in this library, one way I can extend that privilege is by inviting you into my experience. I’d like to take you on a tour of what I read and share my reactions to the various books I had the chance to explore in depth. Perhaps you’re not interested in my reactions — in which case, you can simply enjoy the photos of the original pages. Or maybe you are curious about my thoughts as I read, like the caption I’ve been putting in here. Better yet, you might even want to comment your own thoughts here. Either way, I hope you find as much value and enjoyment as I did in peering into our collective (and mostly British 😅) past.

Think of this like a Twitch streamer doing Let’s Play videos, but like, instead of minecraft, it’s for the people who gets hot and bothered for the “BBC Yearbook of 1947”.

It’s also important to me that I honor, not only the joy of these perspectives, but also the immense intimacy captured in these pages. Not only was the owner of the library kind enough to permit me to read, within these books also contain lives that wrote without awareness of us. There is a difference between voyeurism and reverence.

In the next three parts, I will respectively go over sections of:

The Gentleman’s Magazine for January, 1738.

The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston Volume I, by Evenlyn Ashley, 1879

My Four Years In Germany, by James W Gerard, 1913.

May you enjoy and value them as much as I did.

Hmm, I need to go to the bathroom.

How do I not wake her up?

We had a great time yesterday. She needs the rest.

My arm is asleep, but if I move, it'd wake her.

Maybe I should just gently slide my arm out bit by bit?

Or maybe it'd be better if I just pretend to flip over and pull my arm out in one go. That'd be more natural.

The linens are soft...

Ok, nice I did it. Now I just need to carefully sit up so her side of the bed doesn't move.

Soft steps now, and close the door gently...

It's a good day today.

---

I wake up next to her.

Need the bathroom.

Why does she always sleep diagonally like that?

Those who say it's nice to sleep in the same bed with someone clearly hasn't done it for years at a time.

It's so hot in the bed. How does she even sleep like this?

Might as well flip the blanket over so she gets some cooler air.

She should try more uncomfortable things.

If she doesn't wake up soon, she won't have the time to get ready for her friends.

As usual, she's somehow moved to my side now.

Just move. back. over. here. please.

I should really improve my sleep quality.

---

I wake up next to her.

I need the bathroom.

But I like her scent. Her skin on mine.

She likes it when I kiss her neck and now I get both.

She's also waking up, I see the corner of her smile.

A squeeze before I go.

A month until moving. I'll miss this room even if it's too small for two.

I'm sure that'll always be true with all her things though.

Maybe I should learn how to build a better closet for us.

After all, there'll soon be three of us.

I like how she welcomes me back.

Maybe another 5 minutes...

---

I wake up next to her.

Time for the bathroom.

Haven't noticed these lines on her shoulder before.

Skincare or not, youth always passes.

Doesn't stop me from giving her a grope, a squeeze, and a kiss.

The young really doesn't know how good a kiss can get.

This winter's a harsh one. We should get someone to help with the shoveling.

We should exercise more.

They'd worry less about us too.

Even with her shoulder, she still welcomes me back the same every time.

She'll like the breakfast today.

---

I wake up next to her.

Time for the bathroom.

The linen's soft and cool.

Smells like fresh detergent.

My arm's asleep again. The physiotherapy lady said I ought to call her back when that happens. Hard for me to massage it very well.

It's too cold these days. Next time they visit, I'll ask for a heater.

I sleep better with the bed warmer.

We should take out the photos for the holidays. Can't find where anything is these days.

I'll put up a couple more of you by the bed too.

Good morning. I miss you.

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"Oh man, let me tell you something about Warhammer. When Horus Heresy stole the 40,000 Warhammers, I really felt for Robert Guilliman."

What would you think?

Alternatively, if you heard me say:

"My girlfriend seemed to really like the new salicylic acid cleanser she bought. Maybe I'll gift her the serum next along with a nice moisturizer since she's running out."

What would you think now?

Suppose you heard me say both of these statements in the same conversation—what would you then think about me?

There's a certain kind of inference we are always making, the kind that helps us form crucial predictions as social animals.

Who is this person? Do I like them? Would they like me? Will we get along? Are they potentially my friend? Foe? Mate? Senior? Servant?

Without information of this type, we are at a loss about the relationship between us and them and would, quite appropriately, feel awkward in the situation.

Fortunately, our ability to make inferences about each other is innate and essentially automatic. Social equilibria almost always form without explicit communication and often even without explicit awareness.

Understanding the mechanisms of social inference can be a powerful skill.

“Never Meet Your Heroes”

Social engineering is a relatively popular idea now. By understanding how people make inferences about what is socially appropriate, expectable, or enticing, one can manifest remarkable situations. This is well documented, from the simple, low-effort approach of putting on a yellow construction vest to get into typically blocked-off places, to the higher-effort way of making up a fake top-rated restaurant, to—I don't know man—Sacha Baron Cohen.

Social engineering and social dynamics are subjects and skills one can train in, and it can be quite enlightening. For someone like myself, especially when younger, finding social situations confusing and challenging, it's a bit like seeing the matrix—something that has always been there all along, operating under its hidden principles, waiting to be discovered.

Practicing and gaining fluency here can be quite thrilling and rewarding! Like when I was doing sales, there was something incredible about experiencing steady improvement in my persuasion, consciously and controllably influencing other people's behaviors.

However, like sales can often be when adversarial, fluency in social dynamics can be a sharp weapon for emulating trust, creating asymmetric environments that can conceal, confuse, and coerce.

Public figures understand the importance of this fluency well. They understand that their parasocial image depends on their audience making the correct inferences and associations about them so as to reinforce the image they want. You don't actually have to care or be an expert—you only have to signal the minimal necessary information for the other person to want to believe so and fill in the rest of the picture themselves.

However, just because public figures are aware of its importance doesn't mean their ability always matches up. In addition, the crowd is a fickle beast. Even with the best market research and campaign managers, they can still respond counter to one's will. Consider the following short examples along with how they are received, according to my interpretation:1

Justin Trudeau

In contrast to today, when Trudeau has resigned as an unpopular and ineffective prime minister, much hope was pinned on Trudeau at the beginning of his prime ministership. This clip was quite well received at the time, signaling a tech-literate leader for the future of Canada.

John Cena

I mean, what can I say. Arguably one of the neatest memes out there. John knows who his market is. The rest might be better described by Bo Burnham.

Hillary Clinton

If the John Cena one is pandering, surely this one is also—at least that's what I thought back in 2016. Since then, I've come to appreciate Hillary's position more. I mean, pandering is an annoying tactic for the receiver, especially when done poorly, but one could also consider: for the panderer, why do they have to stoop so low? Why does a 70-year-old woman politician have to pretend she would catch a Dragonite with me just to convince me to vote? I bet she dislikes saying that line as much as I dislike hearing it.

Henry Cavill

A great current example of successful image crafting, partially enabled by the fact that Warhammer feels like the next nerdy social phenomenon (like Marvel circa 2008). Henry skillfully combines what appears to be genuine enjoyment of the universe coupled with the looks of Superman, quite literally symbolizing the kind of man that many Warhammer fans want to be.

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There is a common saying: "Never meet your heroes."

There are endless Reddit threads populated with stories of which public figures are in fact not how they present themselves. Careers are celebrated and crushed on the (in)consistencies of their image.

There's a lot of sense to this. A public figure is greatly incentivized to maximally stretch their image to meet the satisfaction of a large and diverse crowd. Understanding the mechanism they use to achieve this can help us understand that the stretching only works as a result of our minds filling in the gap ourselves.

The same is true even when we scale down to personal relationships. Like the examples I used at the beginning of this post, they are meant to have you infer something about me, and through them, I'm actively inviting you to fill in the gaps of what you think you know about me.

Grace For Our Heroes and Ourselves

To reveal the underbelly of my opening: If you, the reader, are slightly to moderately familiar with Warhammer 40k, you would know that what I said is actually just a slightly overused (but hilarious to me) meme about The Horus Heresy. It suggests to you that I know the meme and what is not true about the universe, but reveals little about how much I actually do know about Warhammer. Depending on your impression of me being more positive or negative, you might range from believing I can tell you all about what happened on Isstvan III to at best being able to name a few Primarchs, respectively.

Similarly for skincare products in the second example. By naming salicylic acid, I'm priming you to believe that I likely know about glycolic acid or hyaluronic acid and what they do for the skin under which conditions. It also primes you to believe that I might be able to recommend Natasha Denona Mini Nude Palette for your eyes, because makeup clusters closely to skincare.

All of this, in my experience, quite powerfully informs whether you feel like "Wow, he might really be someone I'd love to be friends with" versus "eh, pandering parlor tricks."

This same dynamic plays out constantly in our personal relationships, often with higher stakes than we realize. Consider this scenario: you develop feelings for someone who seems remarkably put-together—they speak thoughtfully about their past relationships, acknowledge their mistakes, and demonstrate what appears to be hard-won wisdom about communication and conflict. you think to yourself, "Finally, someone who has their shit together."

What we're responding to is likely a blend of genuine self-awareness mixed with a curated presentation of their best insights, deployed in moments when they feel most confident and articulate. Yet, they might genuinely understand their patterns while still struggling to change them. Or they've learned what thoughtful responses sound like—perhaps from being hurt by partners who couldn't provide them—without necessarily having integrated those insights into their daily reactions.

The co-orchestration here is crucial: we want to believe in their maturity because that's exactly what we've been looking for—someone who won't repeat the frustrating patterns we've experienced before. They want us to see them as already evolved because our culture tells us that's the most attractive version of ourselves to present, especially when we're trying to win someone over. Neither party is necessarily being deceptive—we're both stretching toward a version of connection that feels safer and more promising than the messier reality of two imperfect people figuring it out together.

But what happens when the performance becomes unsustainable? When our emotional maturity hits its limits during the first real conflict, or when we realize our self-awareness extends more to describing our patterns than changing them? The same dissonance that occurs when we meet our public heroes emerges: "This person I thought I knew intimately is not who I thought they were."2

One of my favorite cognitive biases these days is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Here's how it goes:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

What I like about the examples above, whether public figure or myself, is that if you were an expert on the subject matter, it is likely that you are somewhat immune to the other side emulating trust because you can notice and point to where they are "stretching" for your trust.

Justin Trudeau's description of quantum computing is at best introductory, with the word "complex" carrying a lot of the weight for him. As for me, though I try to cover up my ignorance using ChatGPT and my girlfriend's help, it's likely not too difficult to discern that I know more Warhammer than I know skincare and makeup.

What expertise grants is hopefully not cynicism—"all these posers pretending to know things." Instead, may expertise become a source from which we gain valuable information about other people's orientation to the world and our orientation to them.

While it's true that John Cena using Lao Gan Ma for the Chinese audience is like praising maple syrup for a Canadian—a cute and at best endearing signal—the fact that he's learned basic Chinese is still remarkable and respectable. It also gives an empirical feel for how celebrities are influenced by market demands, which gives us predictive power and decreased surprise when, as humans, it's hard to keep up an image across many media appearances, and "mistakes" happen.

Similarly, in our personal relationships, recognizing when someone is stretching for our trust doesn't have to lead to rejection or cynicism. Instead, it can become information about what they value, what they aspire to be, and what they think we want to hear. The gap between aspiration and reality is, after all, the space where growth happens.

An Indian friend and I recently tried something interesting. We decided that I would give him a telling of the entirety of Indian history and he would tell me the entirety of Chinese history. We both like history enough that with the right context, we could probably lead the other to believe that we know far more about their background by selectively revealing details that optimize for the other to fill in the gap themselves. By forcing a lecture on a subject we have very incomplete knowledge of, it revealed the extent to which we do understand and the extent to which we don't—which, as it happens, is "more than we expected, but not too much more"—a fairly calibrated conclusion.3

Through sharing how we cared about what the other person cared about, it granted the affordance and attraction to learn things together. Both of us were excited to fill in the gaps that we saw the other had, appreciating what we do know while also not being cynical about our respective ignorance. Instead, the information of both what we know and what we don't became useful handles to discern what and how to share that would more effectively represent something important to us.

Towards Grace in Practice

By being aware of an existing gap between the image presented and the actual human that surely exists behind the image, we can train to notice both how the other side is stretching for our trust (intentionally or not) and in what circumstances we are vulnerable to giving over our trust as a result.

In the uncommon but worthwhile event that both parties are able to recognize this together, new affordances can also appear. This can look like a different, more non-naive kind of trust that is based on the assumption that this phenomenon is simply part of human cognition.

This matters especially in young or rapidly evolving communities—where new thought leaders emerge rapidly, where expertise is distributed and evolving, where the social dynamics around authority are still forming. The person giving a compelling talk about AI alignment might genuinely understand the technical aspects while having significant blind spots about implementation. The community organizer who seems to effortlessly navigate complex group dynamics might be drawing from real skill while also performing a version of competence that exceeds their actual capacity.

While we may have limited capacity to influence public figures given the immense incentive pressures they are under to optimize for this particular kind of stretching, we can practice in ourselves the ability to notice when we fill in other people's stretching to gain our trust. Meanwhile, recognizing this phenomenon can help us notice how the stretching and filling in of trust occurs around us all the time. Whether it's a teacher, a crush, a parent, or a micro-celebrity, learning to humanize those we idolize can be worthwhile—if nothing else, for the decrease of our own suffering when our image of our idols inevitably mismatches their actual humanity.

As you read this, you've likely formed some impression of me from those opening examples—the Warhammer meme, the skincare products. Maybe you've filled in some gaps about what kind of person I might be, what I know, what I don't. The same mechanisms we've been discussing have been quietly at work throughout our conversation.

This process of stretching and filling, of idolizing and disappointment, of aspiration and reality, continues whether we notice it or not—but noticing changes how we move within it. It is also not just about how we can better orient to others, for the grace we extend to our heroes is the grace we hope to receive when others discover the gap between who we aspire to be and who we actually are.

A normal enough invite, surely?

...

Here's what I then sent, after a big realization:

What do you notice in the second message? Can you spot my "big realization"?

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Wait, I want to have lunch and hang out!!

This isn’t just describing an available option – I actually want this!

In fact, it took me 9 whole minutes to realize that I want something here!

And apparently, when I want something, but am not aware of it, my way of seeking it is something like:

That’s … hmm … not quite how I want to express my desires.

Scarily, the first type of message is common. Especially when I have to manage a lot of incoming demands, messages gets fired off in a way that seeks to protect my bandwidth (I am handling a bunch of tasks at once!) while preserving optionality (I might want or need to do something else!).

Not to mention, it’s scary in itself sometimes to own one’s wants. A dangerous world could manipulate me through knowledge of my desires. A cold world could deny my wants from being satisfied.

Exposing only the option, rather than the desire, can let the other side commit before I match – an all around safer choice. Even when all else fails, I still have the Sour Grapes maneuver handy. A game theory optimal strategy for a scary world.

That said, the context here seem to call for a re-consideration.

This is my partner. If the properties of “Dangerous World” or “Cold World” applies to the relationship with my partner, then very different conversations need to be had. Insofar as they don’t apply, wouldn’t I wish to reveal our desires to each other so we may coordinate around them?

…

So how did she respond?

To my good fortune, she is skilled at reinforcing my behaviors around being clear about what I want.

In fact, her overall response acts as a great foil to mine:

Unlike me, she starts with what she most wanted: highlighting my being clear about what I wanted. Embedding both her implicit interest in the option and the causality that makes her want to meet my interest.

Only after expressing what mattered to her does she comment on the option itself, in this case: logistically unclear.

She then finishes by making the implicit interest in the first message explicit: that independent of logistics, she is interested in the option.

In the aforementioned “Cold World” where our wants could be left unsatisfied, the different “Warm World” isn’t one where our wants are always satisfied.1 It’s a world where connection and intimacy are maintained or deepened regardless of each want being satisfied or not.

In the warm world, trust is built through each instance of learning that the other cares about what we want and vice versa.

In a warm and intimate world, whether a family, an organization, or a society, vulnerability and disappointment is not scary or costly, quite the opposite.

Granted, cold worlds can often be the norm. Fear and protectiveness are appropriate responses to the real risk and dangers that vulnerability means in an abusive family, a tyrannical organization, or a repressive society.

However, an optimal strategy for individuals in a cold world also doesn’t bring about warm worlds.

In the worlds that matter to us, whatever they may be, we can add warmness by taking calculated bets towards vulnerability.

Part of my realization above included an immense sense of gladness – that it “only” took 9 minutes to realize I wanted to spend time with my partner.

How many regrets on death beds are the same realization, taking far, far, too long to realize?

"Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.“ Einstein"

Intro

When we are evaluating anything, we need some means by which to evaluate the thing. So long as we wish for some Thing to become some different Thing, we will incorporate the notion of Values into it. That is, we value Thing more to be in State Y rather than State X, and thus we expend energy we deem worthwhile to influence it so.

A lion values a gazelle to be in an "eat-able" state, while the gazelle values its "continuing-to-live" state, and insofar as these two are incompatible in the specific context of an engagement between a hungry lion and an available gazelle, the two will respectively expend energy towards its valued state until a multitude of factors in the world collapses the query into the valued state of the lion or the gazelle.

When we wish to do good, our definitions of good (state Y is preferable over state X), consciously or not, communicable or not, will bleed through our actions that seek to influence the world. Our ability to communicate with each other, beyond the local value systems we each have, will be the basis for creating the parallax on which new, previously imperceivable, ways of doing good emerge.

An idea I have great affinity for is the notion of "Cause X", an idea representing epistemic humility – keeping in mind that there may be unknown ways of doing good, or Cause Areas, in the world missed by our current understanding. If we hope to have a chance to discover any Cause Xs or even just any information about the possibility of there being any Cause Xs, it seems we must get better at navigating different systems of value and knowing.

A Scenario on Navigating Differences in Education:

Suppose my father works at a United Nations education initiative, aiming to keep children in school. This initiative is backed by enormous financial investments to incentivize young children, particularly girls, to go to school in developing countries. It is supported by ample research pointing to this type of intervention as one of the most reliable lead measures for a nation's growth towards a "developed country". My father knows well that his work of helping children stay in school will lead to greater gender equality, income equality, and greater scientific and economic output, all foundational values of modern democracies.

Meanwhile, I work at the Thiel Fellowship, with the opposite aim of keeping youths out of school. I operate with the model, increasingly recognized, that modern education is one of the more ghastly experiments of humankind. Born out of a dark history of religious dogmatism and imperial servitude, and refined by industrial-style management, our education raises each generation with basic wounds around self-worth, an inability to deal with the unknown, and a broken sense of interdependence with those around them. I work with the knowledge that every person liberated from modern schooling has the potential to be re-empowered to become a creative citizen in society, able to tackle modernity's most complex challenges.

One can probably imagine what my family life will look like here: dinner arguments over who is correct and hurt feelings around why my father/son seems to be personally disrupting what is "obviously good".

What one can perhaps imagine, but may feel is closer to idealistic fantasy, is what I believe must be strived for. In my not-so-distant-fantasy, my father and I could start any conversation with an implicit or explicit agreement and mutual appreciation of our shared desire to support future generations. How incredibly fortunate! We could subsequently be curious about how and why our model of doing good (in education) appears opposite, exploring the differences in our respective lives growing up and fostering the intimacy between a Father and a Son. We might arrive at the remarkable observation that there's a notable socio-economic divide in that: those of higher social mobility tend to explore alternative schooling options while the global poor are encouraged to stay in school, and that this may be indicative of an uneven distribution of innovation and knowledge around the impact of education. We could exclaim together how this disconnect leaves the global poor behind with more of the same trauma, and doesn't support the global rich in recognizing the abandonment/colonial pattern, which undermines their own effectiveness in innovation. From our parallax, my father and I may discover that I have always wanted to scale our alternative education experiments beyond eccentric young founder-types, while my father has just the right local partners to start pilot programs around the world. We are now learning together, with more effectiveness and intimacy as a team and as a family, and we are seeing more about the nature of the complex problem, in this case education, than either of us could before.

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Briefly on Objectivity as an Incomplete Lens for Doing Good Together

One could consider that, in examples like the above, were we to evaluate from the almighty lens of Objectivity, we could enlighten more systematically the "clearly superior/most effective" way to do good. Examining the world “objectively” has revealed many hidden cause areas that were once neglected. It does appear invaluable when we discover that it takes $30,000 to train a guide dog, while it takes $3 to deworm someone who might develop blindness, and that the latter is meaningfully underfunded than the former. This unveils a meaningful way of doing good through correcting for the funding gap.

But this too is partial, as illustrated by the school example above. Robust research suggests both directions from "me" and "my father" as valid interventions for “better education”, and the underpinning cruxes are undecidable purely from the perspective of which is “objectively better”. This is because it pertains to the impossibility of perfectly predicting the future and its associated counterfactuals, as well as when comparing judgements around value, Objectivity is no longer the relevant realm of consideration, Subjectivity is. [footnote: The best we often seem to achieve in these scenarios is an “agree to disagree” situation that leaves both sides with slight-to-siginificant bitter tones.]

Assuming that we are within the shared context of a common definition of good, though, we can then imagine creating a market around that definition, and smooth out inefficiencies, like in the guide dog and deworming example. Markets are extraordinarily good at this! This is obviously an important mechanism in the entire ecology of "cultivating a better world". However, a market is only as good as creating equilibria within the definition embedded in said market. If the market's "Good" is about the maximization of profit for participating agents over time, then desirable and undesirable behaviors will occur. If a market's "Good" is defined as discovering the best arbitrage opportunities within globally legible altruistic projects, under some model of utility as a proxy for "Good", then we have something approximating Effective Altruism, which also has desirable and undesirable behaviors. [*footnote: Modifying this definition of utility without future discounting seems to yield something approximating EA Longtermism, and with the discounting seems to yield something approximating classic EA. Granted, this is a relatively strawman version of EA and its strands, but what it also does suggest is that there are likely many more strands of EA yet to find maturity.]

This is not to say our decisions can not be informed by an "Objective" Lens. In the education example above, we can likely agree that both interventions from my father and me are "good" interventions, and we can better understand how and why the respective intervention is good by examining the data/research that supports each side. What the "Objective" lens does poorly on though, is that it does not support my father and I collaborating on a synthesis that emerges fusion solutions that are likely to be "better" than both interventions done independently of each other. To achieve this, we must get past the objective lens' tendency to evaluate something to be “better” than the other, rather that one is likely informative of the other. [footnote, Which, if anything, is more "objective" in the end. my personal gripes with objectivity is a lot more in how we seem to relate to the idea of objectivity than objectivity itself.]

Ultimately, doing good together effectively seems to require crossing the bridge of being able to navigate different understandings of value. This means moving away from "destroying each other with facts and logic" to creating parallax and new possibilities that multiple parties would want to collaborate and contribute to.

"Seeking Cause X"

In the late 1800s, there was a popular sentiment among physicists and other scientists claiming that we are near the end of Science, where we will soon discover everything there is to know about the cosmos. With the advent of relativistic and quantum physics – models that opened up a greater realm of knowing while accounting for the old Newtonian model – we discovered that we are nowhere near the “end of Science”. It seems instead it was more apt to describe the 1800s sentiment as: we are hitting significantly diminishing returns on “the theories by which we are understanding the universe/doing science”. As we broke past the limits of our own theories, we instead found more mysteries than we could have imagined.

Metaphorically, if a given system of values (and its associated ways of knowing) is like a tree that can bear fruits (i.e. good things that we want), then as we become really familiar with the particular system of knowing, any low-hanging fruits will eventually be plucked. A methodology that isn’t bound to any particular system of value, then, would be like searching for the forest to find new fruitful trees, without being bound by any fruiting tree. [Footnote: For example, upon the invention of the combustion engine, the value of hydrocarbons dramatically shifted, creating an explosion of advancements in the movement of things, until the diminishing returns of the present, where we are now looking for new models that can replace and exceed the dominant technology.]

Similarly, any given theory around doing good would have its own associated low-hanging fruits and would over time hit diminishing returns. In order to reliably find new worthwhile ways of doing good, we have to be flexible enough to fluidly adopt multiple theories of good. In the metaphor of the fruiting trees in a forest, it means we would need some means to actually compare apples and oranges.

So, if we were to assume any Cause X, defined as a cause area, or a way of doing good, that is previously unrecognizable, then any meaningful method of discovery must account for what’s beyond our local epistemology. Thus, such a methodology has to be transcendent of any particular system of value – a meta-systematic method of evaluation.

Any development in research or training on such a meta-methodology that can evaluate multiple kinds of systems of value could potentially yield an abundance of Cause Xs. This creates a plethora of new research conundrums, taking us from “what Cause Xs might be out there?” to “which of all these Cause Xs should I or we pursue/prioritize?”. While it creates more mysteries than answers, what it can provide is a platform that accepts multiple ways of doing good in radically different yet complementary systems of knowing/value. It permits collaboration amongst altruists that departs from the argumentative “what kind of good is ‘best’” and towards complementary discoveries of new ways of doing good that more effectively achieve multiple parties’ aims, despite their apparent initial contradictions.

The dilemma of navigating differences of value is pervasive on all levels of human organizing. It’s when parents discuss which is more important, acquiring a math tutor for their daughter or letting her continue drawing. It’s in an NGO deciding whether direct cash transfers would be better or radio broadcasted education programs. It’s in the political left and the political right and those that aren’t covered by that single axis. It’s in the indigenous elder saying we need to learn to slow down as well as the environmentalist saying we must act now. A method for navigating these differences can unlock the latent complementary aspects of different interventions, forming more effective synthesis and a more collaborative culture amongst altruists, a virtuous cycle that begets more effectiveness.

If we assume our theories of doing good are always partial, then we can start from a place that recognizes differences as valuable perspectives that might yield information on what’s being missed. This transforms the nature of conflict. We can disentangle feedback from praise and blame and recognize feedback for what it is – information. From this information, we can see previously invisible aspects of what we care about and thereby be empowered to affect the world in previously inconceivable ways – discovering Cause X.

Every naysayer becomes our most valued collaborator. Every contradiction becomes an opportunity for wonder.

Summary

Whether there exists an Ultimate Good is beyond this post, but conveniently, we don't need to go there. So long as we are subjective beings using proxies or representations to navigate the universe, then any single dominant representation will create distortions.

Our theories are our models, or maps, from which we examine the territory. Whether it's the biological range of what we can see and hear, or our model of physics, the map is what give us clues in the first place as to what landmarks we can even recognize. If we are not cognizant of the models we use, we are liable to miss the territory. If the territory is in fact infinitely more complex than our maps, then we must treat maps that are different from ours as, at minimum, deeply informative for our goals of influencing the world to be "better".

Starting from the epistemic humility of recognizing the possible existence of Cause X, we can invoke our curiosity and wonder to seek out the perspectives yet unavailable to us. Fortunately, those perspectives are readily available around us, in other subjective entities from other people to the nation state to the forests. We have to learn the meta-methodology that permits the listening that can integrate the differences in perspective to form new understandings.

More illustratively, if I'm looking for herbs to heal a wound, rather than looking at google maps and lamenting that herbs don't seem to exist, one might want to consult the weird lady telling us to look at the bush right outside our door.

The salesman before me celebrated as the signature went onto the document that legally binds car ownership.

This was maybe the fifth signature that was needed across maybe four different documents.

The salesman ran through the details simultaneously like a siren singing a lullaby and a lawyer machine gunning legalese. A fair competition for any lecturing professor reading off text-filled slides, I can feel my eyes glaze over, hypnotized to move as instructed.

A part of me was also greatly amused, in an anthropological sense.

I once did sales when I was younger. Not the kind of sales that closed big contracts with fat bonuses. It was the type that would come up to you while you’re shopping and convince you to sign up for a credit card kind of sales.

I got pretty good at it too! At my peak, I calculated that if I did that job full time, I could make $100,000 a year, off of something like selling 50 credit cards a day.

During this job, I learned many of the same techniques as the car salesman: Talking in a way that enables every signal possible to disable the customer’s critical thinking ability. By the time they’ve put their signature down, walked off and finally had a moment to reflect that this may not have been the best idea, it was already too late and too bothersome to cancel.

I haven’t been on the receiving end of this so blatantly in some time. It’s helpful to be reminded just how well-proven these techniques are, even if one is familiar with them. In a different sense, I also have a kind of appreciation for the expertise displayed. While it’s not something I particularly endorse now, it’s nonetheless a skill that one can develop mastery in. After all, beneath the veil of the selling experience exists the turbulence of having income and status being decided – it’s quite the testing ground for managing one’s internal experience.1

One thing that’s interesting about doing sales, in my experience, is that you can distinguish the activity along a spectrum. On the one end is “sales that repeat” and on the other end “sales that do not repeat”, each with notably different incentives.

The differentiation here is that if the sale is meant to repeat, a relationship must be cultivated. If there isn’t a repetition, then no relationship is to be cultivated.

This corresponds well to a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma vs. an iterated prisoner’s dilemma. As economic theory suggests, defecting in the one-shot game is more typically the default, but in an iterated game (where the relationship matters and each round influences the results of subsequent games), cooperation is far more common.

In the case of repetition, we expect to care more about how the relationship is forming. Every move serves to both facilitate an immediate sale while also increasing the likelihood of future sales. This type of sale can look like a politician running for multiple terms, a management consultant retaining large clients, or a hairdresser who’s cut someone’s hair for 20 years.

My case with selling credit cards is a good example of a non-repeating game. I am interested in a sale, now; for my commission, now. The likelihood of a person getting a second card from me is pretty low, so that’s irrelevant to my considerations. Similarly so for the car salesman. While a small portion of car buyers may be interested in buying cars repeatedly enough that the dealership and salesperson can expect a large volume, the majority of customers would likely buy a car once every few years, meaning much of the profit is to be made now. This is especially so for the salesperson, who would likely be working elsewhere by the time the average buyer returns, unlike the dealership, which tends to hang around.

There is a notable phenomenon with no-repeat or low-repeat games in sales, though. Precisely because there’s no need to be concerned with how the customer feels after committing, during the sales process itself, I can basically say whatever I want, so long as it’s legal and within my notion of ethics.

In this type of sales environment, I found that I became very good with bullshitting. Specifically, bullshitting in the Harry Frankfurt sense – to be ambivalent about truth while speaking. I mostly said things for the sake of occupying attention so the other party would feel relaxed.

A typical exchange after they are interested, but before they have signed, might sound a little like this:

David: This will only take a few minutes while I fill out some information. Are you cool with that? I think this is a great idea, gas is a large monthly expense for people these days you know. Especially with this [brand] you've got, it's probably quite a gas guzzler.

Person: Uh sure. Yea ever since I changed to this new car, it costs me more gas now.

David: Great! I actually thought to myself your car looked quite new, how much did you get it for? Ah, I actually have to give a rough figure for your income on the form. What's a good ballpark for it? Alternatively, based on how much the car costs, I can also just guess a range for the form for you, it's mostly a formality.

Person: Yea I got it last year, costed me quite a bit. I guess you could put down like, $70k.

David: Cool. And did it? I hear a lot of people tend to lease rather than buy these days. I don't think I'd ever buy, since I wouldn't want to just stick to the same car for a long time eh? Also, what do you want to say for your occupation?

Person: I'm a mechanical engineer. Oh I definitely want to buy. Lease just doesn't give me the freedom to tweak with the car myself. Engineer and all you know. Companies these days are really uppity about their terms these days.

While I’m extracting rather intimate details about the other person, a good 70% of my energy is spent on generating conversation just engaging enough that the other side doesn’t have the opportunity to reflect on what’s transpiring. During this time, I have no allegiance to the content coming out of my mouth. I don’t care about how much a car costs or whether leasing or buying is better.

I am working hard on generating the illusion of an existing and lasting relationship, fostered only until the person in front of me leaves, at which point the illusion ends. There is no real relationship.

The difference between an experienced salesperson and an inexperienced one, for these non-repeat games, was how good they are at fostering the illusion of relationship. People are segmented into personalities for which you build scripts. Once these scripts are internalized into muscle memory, one can get remarkably good at appearing friendly and trustworthy for a first (usually fragile) impression.2

The problem with having all my energy on creating a relationship illusion is that I have neither consciousness or responsibility over what I am actually saying.3

“Welcome to the [city name] Honda Family!”

The automated phone system said in a distinctly robotically friendly way.

Wow, they are really committing to the bit here. It’s not just the salesman saying that.

Are we part of a family now? I think to myself.

The thing is, though, there’s no such thing as a non-repeat sales game. It, itself, is an illusion. We might conceive of it as a theoretical construct. We might even implement it in rigorous experiments to test people’s behaviors. However, in reality, we are born into a continuous game, and the game continues, hopefully long after we, ourselves, have passed on.

Empirically, I can tell you, and I don’t imagine surprising you, that I had the hardest time selling in large cities. Most city folks tend to have developed an immune response to a random-overly-enthusiastic guy coming up to them. "Don’t even start!" I would hear often; just saying no is a sensible strategy here. Expectably, I had my best sales records in small towns, where people were less busy and more trusting. The smaller towns still retain a vestige of communal trust and interconnectivity – trust that I was eroding with each game I played as a non-repeat game. I was teaching them through my actions to turn away the next time they come across someone needing help or someone genuinely interested in sharing something.

When the Honda dealership includes me in its family, I am to contend with dissonance, be that consciously or unconsciously: when they say family, surely they don’t mean “family” as I understand it?

If I were sick, could I call up the sales department and expect them to take care of me?

If they were in debt, would I expect myself to house them like I did Alice?

What creates the dissonance isn’t only the fact that they mean family differently than I do. The dissonance comes from the fact that this is insidiously “un-talk-about-able”.

It wouldn’t be strange for a new couple to ask each other “now that we are dating, what do you think this means”, but an amusing social experiment it surely would be, if I walked into the dealership and said the same: “Now that we are a family, what do you think this means for us?”

After pushing through what would probably be marketing speak like “oh the Honda family wants to be an anchor in the local community”, followed by a hefty amount of awkwardness, we might instead get the answer: “I don’t know, it’s just a thing we say because it seems on brand.”

Only then do we touch something real because at that point, the point where we pull back the veil and have a real conversation, it is an actual human we are talking with. It’s not the Honda family speaking, because that’s hardly real; it’s Joe, the human who happens to be a salesperson.

Joe, without any malice and only an intent to make his paycheck, nonetheless contributes to the local community’s sense of what “Family” is supposed to mean.

If someone tells me, “Family are those you can always depend on”, I may need to consider, “Well, probably not the Honda kind, right?”

This is part 4 of the Building Tall series. Consider also, part 1 and part 2.

Many years ago, in a spell of needing to be more productive, I asked a mentor for advice on how to read more, like “3 times as many books as I’m reading now.”

“Instead of reading 3 times more books, can you read 3 books-worth out of one book?”

In the last post of the series, I want to take the idea of Building Tall and apply it to the atomic components of our daily lives – our Actions.

Personal Actions

All the way until adulthood, the idea of composting was foreign to me. I was vaguely aware that some industrial applications benefited from composting, but doing it myself was somewhere around “unimaginable” and “beneath me”. There was only one category in my mind growing up – garbage. Somewhere in my early teens, I developed a new category: Recycling. However, composting didn’t really become a thing until I moved into a shared house with others.

“Ugh, cleaning out the food and deliberately put it in a bin to be thrown out separately. So gross and effortful.” I would think to myself.

Though, for convoluted reasons, I became more interested in biology. Not just the protein and enzyme kind, but also the permaculture kind. These ecological models started to click real well with other subjects I wanted to learn about, providing inspiration for other domains. Over time, composting actually became super cool! I try to do it more, whenever possible. Failing to compost is now accompanied by a distinct sense of discomfort.

Meanwhile, I have kept relatively long hair since COVID. It’s still fairly foreign to me, especially the part where I keep finding long strands of hair all over the place and needing to do a double take – hey, this is my hair! When I run my hand through my hair, sometimes loose strands come along with the brushing motion. The question then arises: What do I do with loose strands of hair?

Compost it, of course!

Another question arises, though, when it comes to a pragmatic consideration of opportunity costs.

Suppose I’m sitting at my desk and a stray strand of hair was found. To dedicate enough attention to it, get up from my chair, walk to the compost bin, brush it off my hands, only to walk back to my chair and probably lose the thread of whatever I was doing… Is this worth it? Isn’t this just unnecessarily increasing entropy in the universe? Why would I go through all this trouble?

Changing the frame of reference, however, away from the notion of opportunity cost, and instead consider it a different way. Insofar as a single strand of composted hair is ~inconsequential and most loose strands of hair are ~unaccountable, such a “trivial” action becomes almost entirely weighed by its symbolism – its meaning. The Herculean effort (relative to the utility of the action) to go so deliberately out of my way to compost a strand of hair is then an action that indicates to observers (in this case myself) the weight of the value.

In other words, when someone is taking an action that has little “apparent” value, if they are going through disproportionate effort to accomplish said action, then we can account for the cost-benefit asymmetry by inferring that there is a lot of “hidden” value. Often, the “hidden” value can be discovered by examining the “meaning” of the action.

This can be very obvious when illustrated. The “meaning” of “a drink of water” to someone lost in a desert and an urbanite with drinkable tap water is radically different. The effort they would undertake to accomplish the action is also radically different.

However, this can be less clear, sometimes even intractable to communicate, when we examine other cases.

Consider the case of Amar Bharati, or “guy who kept his arm raised for 50 years”. Why would someone do something like this? Even more strangely, why would people find this inspiring – to the extent that some even copied his gesture?

Well, it’s not like he’s hiding the why or anything:

“I do not ask for much. Why are we fighting our sons among ourselves? Why is there so much hatred and enmity between us? I just want all Indians and the whole world to live in peace with each other.”

And, so, as a testament of his devotion to Shiva, in order “to militate against wars and support world peace", he raised his arm and just … didn’t put it down.

If my “Herculean” effort to compost a strand of hair illustrates at all the significance of the value of composting is to me, then Amar Bharati has surely illustrated the significance to himself and others just how important world peace is to him.

Importantly, one doesn’t need to have a devotion to Shiva, or a particular affinity for World Peace to “appreciate” the action. Without needing to agree with his cause or method, one can be struck by the cost of his undertaking. “I mean, I’m not sure why anyone would go that far or if it’s even a good way to go about it, but he clearly cares about this.”

Through the cost and significance of the action, it creates a feedback loop that foregrounds the more ineffable “meaning” behind the action. Every bit of “cost” towards the value or meaning reinforces the value itself. The value, reinforced, then facilitates the next action towards this. Devotion towards some value enters a positive feedback loop – devotion begets devotion.

Collective Actions

There’s a general class of problems that I hold as underpinning much of global issues like climate change or various arms races. These are Collective Action problems. As we examine the meaning behind our and each other’s actions, we also gain insight and a lever into evaluating and coordinating collective action problems.

In economics, there is a type of game played to evaluate sociality within a group of people. One popular example is the Ultimatum Game. In it:

One player, the proposer, is endowed with a sum of money. The proposer is tasked with splitting it with another player, the responder (who knows what the total sum is). Once the proposer communicates their decision, the responder may accept it or reject it. If the responder accepts, the money is split per the proposal; if the responder rejects, both players receive nothing.

To give an example, if you were given $100, and have to choose to give me some portion of the money to share (between $0-100), what would you give me, knowing that if I don’t like it (e.g. you only give me $5), I can decide that both of us don’t get money.

Interestingly, modeling this game with “rational agents”, the logic goes that you should give me the absolute minimum above $0 because from my “rational” perspective, my return is positive if I accept anything above $0, but my return would be nothing if I turn your offer down, whatever the offer is. Knowing this, you would give me something minimally above $0 so that you can maximize your returns, knowing I would accept it. This would even be true if we were thinking about the game in a contextless, abstract sense.

Reality, of course, obliterates this naive notion of “rational agents”. We are often willing to incur “cost” in order to protect an abstract value, such as “fairness”. If I give you $1 and keep $99, you are likely to feel the inappropriateness of the action and reject the deal so that neither of us gets money. Not only that, you probably learned that I’m not someone you would like to cooperate with in the future. ~Instinctually, sociality is a part of our psychosocial makeup.

However, depending on how the game is set up, we can influence the degree of sociality present in the relationship. We can probably imagine that players from egalitarian tribes may display different patterns than investment bankers. Similarly, we can imagine a loving parent-child duo playing this game would also be different than a couple with an abusive relationship.

What these tags (egalitarian tribe, abusive relationship, etc) influence is the meaning that is woven through the game, or how is the game embedded?

“Why would such a game be played?”

“Who are the other players to me and me to them?”

“What would they think or do if I were selfish or cooperative? What would I think of them?”

“What is the meaning if we were different from each other? If we were the same?”

“Why would I want to be selfish or cooperative? What about them?”

Questions like these are invisibly and invariably considered as we make such a decision. Arriving at variance across cultures, across relationships, across moods.

Having considered these questions, our actions are then a reflection of what we think. For those in observance (whether that is ourselves, others, god, or spirits), we signal what we think and how to coordinate with us.

The person who’s playing the ultimatum game purely for selfish utility and the person who’s playing while considering what the game says about the world inhabit different worlds and thus live out very different lives.

One day in 1671, Christopher Wren observed three bricklayers on a scaffold, one crouched, one half-standing and one standing tall, working very hard and fast. To the first bricklayer, Christopher Wren asked the question, “What are you doing?” to which the bricklayer replied, “I’m a bricklayer. I’m working hard laying bricks to feed my family.” The second bricklayer, responded, “I’m a builder. I’m building a wall.” But the third brick layer, the most productive of the three and the future leader of the group, when asked the question, “What are you doing?” replied with a gleam in his eye, “I’m a cathedral builder. I’m building a great cathedral to The Almighty.”

Actions are powered by meaning, and meaning is kaleidoscopically diverse. When the meaning of an action is powerfully aligned, an individual (or a group) can do incredible things, from jumping on a grenade to protect others to creating generation-defining art.1

In the story, the cathedral builder is taking a “tall” action. It’s tall not only in the sense that it has the “grandest” of meanings but also that to relate properly to that grand meaning, the “lesser” layers of meaning like “building a wall” and “laying a brick” are just as important. The cathedral builder should know that if they were to think laying bricks and building walls as beneath them, because their vision is only the grandest of cathedrals, then no cathedral will ever come to fruition. Every brick laid with care is what adds up to the greatest of monuments.

It’s precisely when all of the layers of meaning are present that the tallness of the action is most proper. If the action comes only from the most grand layer, then what results is not an art of Greatness, but mere grandiosity.

It’s also worth noting that Greatness does not necessarily need to express itself in conventional ideas of greatness. The story itself also hints at alternatives: the action of laying bricks to feed my family and building a wall because I’m a builder are all perfectly fine paths to enable tall actions. There is no shortage of stories of artistry or heroism in providing for one’s family or appreciating one’s vocation.

A path for tall actions can come from anywhere because meaning can emerge from anywhere.

Meaning, held as an emergent property of all interactions, leads people to found empires, burn books, create new science, commit murder, meditate for decades, get married, get divorced, and every action in between.

And as each action etches its mark onto the world, we also communicate to ourselves and those around us what we think this world is, informing where subsequent meaning and actions come from. Round and round, weaving our relationships, institutions, and the very society we live in.

My parents worked hard to put me in her homeroom class. I was weak at Math.

What I remember was that she was mean and strict. She had a way of talking that was distinctly lecture-y in a way that I didn’t like. With a tone that felt like the pitches of dial-up internet, she always sounded condescending to me. In fact, it’s hard for me to imagine her eyes looking at me in any way other than a certain subtle quality of disdain.

I wasn’t a good student. If that wasn’t already clear from the description of Ms. Lin’s attitude.

On the last day of the semester, as parents came to pick up students and say goodbye for the holidays, I hoped hard for not having to talk to her.

I wasn’t coming back next semester. I am finally getting out of here.

I had just said goodbye to TianXiang, my one friend at this school.

As people gathered around the office building, I flinched internally as Ms. Lin’s eyes caught mine. Her face grew into a smile. It’s the smile that she always puts on when my parents are around. She looked almost kind. She didn’t sound like dial-up internet as she greeted us.

“David! Congratulations on finishing the semester.”

“Thank you for taking care of David this semester, Ms. Lin.” My parents responded.

“It’s my pleasure, David is very bright! He’s also quite the jokester, as I’m sure you know. He often brings laughter to the other students.”

You didn’t quite appreciate that when you made me stand outside in the sun for a whole class. I retorted in my mind.

“He does like to talk a lot. We know he can be disruptive in class at times, so again, thank you for teaching and guiding him.” my mom said.

“So, where are you off to next David?” Ms. Lin asked.

“I’m going to Canada,” I muttered.

“Oh.”

Ms. Lin paused, and a smile I have never seen from her formed on her face. Or was it a smile? It was a foreign face.

This face felt actually kind. The smile, if it was a smile, wasn’t quite a smile for joy. I could see something like happiness in the shape of her mouth, yet her eyes almost had a sadness to it. There was gladness and – maybe sorrow? – in her tone. I didn’t understand this face.

“That’s great! Good luck to you!”

“Come put your shoes on, it’s time to go.”

“Coming!” I reluctantly turn off the TV. I like this show. Just a few more episodes and I’ll get to see how it ends. Feng said the ending scene is when the male lead decides to kill himself to save his love. There’s no way!

I put on my shoes and strapped a bigger-than-usual bag onto my back.

I help locked the door. I like this new door. It’s way cooler than our door before the renovation.

On a typical day, I might have turned left and headed up the stairs either to the 5th floor or the 7th floor to play with friends. Today, we turned right, to the elevator.

We walk towards our white 2002(?) Suzuki Alto and as usual, I start to prepare myself.

With the car doors open, I wait for Mom and Dad to get on first. I’m counting the seconds in my mind as whiffs of the “car smell” unpleasantly waft to my nose.

At the last possible moment, I take three big breaths of fresh air and begin holding my breath. I dive into the passenger seat, close the door, and start cranking the window down. When I’m about to run out of breath, I quickly extend my head out of the window and take my next gulp of air. No puking this time.

Meanwhile, my Dad backed out of the parking lot where I had a huge water gunfight with 30 other kids from the nearby apartments. We turned towards the gate out of our apartment complex, along the brick paths where I first learned to bike.

As I hung my head out the window to breathe, a friend spotted me.

“Hey, David!”

“Hey! Where are you going?”

“I’m going to the playground with the others. Where are you going?”

“I’m going to Canada!”

“Oh…”

An almost imperceptible pause followed.

“Well, see you tomorrow!”

“Yeah! See you tomorrow!”

For who knows how long, I stared out the window looking at the mystifying scene below. Looking at all the different kinds of clouds doesn’t seem to get old. It was the second time I had ever been in the air and the excitement had not changed.

It did get old though. Between the unchanging clouds and the expanse of blue underneath, it was no longer grasping my attention.

I didn’t know flying can take so long. It’s even getting dark outside the window.

“Try to get some sleep,” my Mom said.

“I don’t feel sleepy though” I responded.

One of the push carts was coming around again.

I wonder what they’ll bring this time?

My nose gave me the answer before the cart even arrived. It was the unmistakable smell of instant noodles.

I wretch inside. For some reason, even though I used to love it, it now makes my stomach turn. I like the dry version – why can’t they just have brought that instead?

The flight attendant came by.

“…?”

I couldn’t understand what she said.

“… noodles?” she repeated, in a way I feel like I could almost comprehend.

“No.” I shook my head.

“Are you sure?” the flight attendant followed up, more slowly this time. Hey, I understood that!

“No.” I shook my head again.

She nodded, took a bowl, placed it on my empty tray table, and continued up the plane.

!?!?!?

Why? I just said no? In stunned bewilderment, the already impossible act of communicating that I didn’t want this became doubly impossible.

As the nauseating smell hits me harder now, I wake Mom from her sleep: “Can you eat this?”

She stirs and turns to me: “You should eat some, or you’ll be hungry later.”

“But I don’t like instant noodles,” I whined.

“Then you don’t have to finish it, just eat what you can.”

Sulkily, I picked up the bowl and nibbled away.

I didn’t finish it, but it was OK.

It was late, perhaps 10 pm? Or maybe it was 6 pm?

Sitting in a taxi more fancy than any taxi I have sat in before, I scratched at my itchy sweater. I always hated sweaters. Fortunately, the scenery outside distracts me.

It was white outside. I have never seen this before.

I have never seen snow before.

We are in “Toronto” now.

The first thing on my to-do list: Finally get a feel of what snow feels like.

I bet it’s really soft. It probably feels great to play with!

“Are we there yet?”

“Almost,” Mom replied.

“I can’t wait to play with the snow!”

“Yeah, you’ve been excited about that since hearing about Canada.”

Look at all those houses! We are going to be living in big houses like this? I wonder as the car turns away from taller buildings into rows and rows of houses.

I have never seen houses before.

On a road called “Finch Ave”, our car turned into a big 3-floor house that had two garage doors. It was strangely symmetrical with a door on each end.

“Wow, our house is huge!”

“We are only on the first floor on the right side. Auntie Jin will be upstairs, she’ll come out shortly to help us.”

The car stops on the right side of the house, in front of the big garage door.

“…” The taxi driver said something incomprehensible.

“Can I go play with the snow now?” I asked.

“Sure, go ahead,” Mom responded while communicating with the driver.

I opened the door, and a still foreign feeling of freezing air hit my face as I did.

I jump out of the car, running to the nearest pile of snow a few feet away from the car, barely registering the strange feeling of a thin layer of snow under my feet.

As soon as I could reach it, I shoved my hands into the large snow pile and grasped.

A sharp, not-quite-pain-like sensation hit me.

It’s unpleasant.

This is just like the freezer at home.

Now my hands are wet, I grimace as the wind helpfully emphasizes how cold my hands are. Almost confused, this wasn’t how I imagined snow would be for some reason.

I walked back to the car, wiping my hand on my jacket, which didn’t help the sensation of numbing hands.

“What happened? You didn’t like the snow?” Mom asked, clearly seeing the lack of delight on my face.

“It’s cold.”

A simple comparison might be a small town one-building school with 50 students, compared to a 10,000-student university campus.

It should be straightforward that the latter is more complex than the former. The straightforwardness of the comparison should come from the fact that the university campus is simply “greater” in most dimensions. The university campus is both more “wide” and “tall”. Wide in the sense that there are more buildings, cover a greater area, and have a bigger population. It’s also tall in the sense that there are more layers baked into its usage – a lecture hall may be used for lectures, conferences, and theatre.1

However, we may confuse the picture a bit by adding some nuance.

Suppose the university campus is not particularly notable, known as one of the universities that co-exists with 5 other similarly unremarkable universities in the same city. It doesn’t produce research results or extracurricular activities as it’s more so a degree mill where 60% of the students are part-time or online attendees. In contrast, the small town school is the only one in the area. It educates nearly all children in the surrounding region with a remarkable integration of its retired educated population, while functioning as a nexus for many of the town’s political, social, and economic functions.

In this picture, it might become less clear which is more “complex”. We might imagine that this updated description means the university is still wide but lost some of its “tallness”, while the small town school has gained “tallness”.

By now, we have started to gain some handles on what “tallness” is. It should relate closely to ideas like “density of coherent meaning” and “high in dimensionality or complexity”. In everyday speak, when we sense “tallness”, we might describe it with words like “richness” or “depth”.

Or: To be “tall” is to be imbued with complexity, with life. Tallness isn’t only density, but rather a density of coherent differences, a density of plurality, a plurality that endures.

That said, tallness can, at least for me, feel a bit ephemeral – difficult to pin down as a formalized, generally applicable description. However, I find it’s often a good trick to infer how “tall” X is by looking at how X perceives the world. This is to say, if there are more ways (i.e. dimensions) a city, institution, or person, perceives reality, the more tall they are likely to be – they are able to discern more aspects of relevance in the world.2

In the case of institutions, we can get a better handle on institutional “tallness” by evaluating how they perceive the world: Metrics.

Metrics, as a metric for institutional tallness

Take, for example, a school again.

The modern metric for school is the grading system. Whether by percentage or letter grade, we assign a label on one dimension on which a student’s performance is evaluated. The label is then consolidated on a “transcript” (an institutionally legible artifact) that conveys to other associated institutions the “nature” of the student the transcript is describing. The stakes of these labels can be extraordinarily high, from the Chinese Gaokao to the Indian JEE, people hold very firm beliefs about the consequences of not performing well along the dimension that schools find legible.

Fortunately though, even in the toughest testing environments, semblances of human diversity are difficult/impossible to erase. Even if one is bad at studying, there’s still a path for the extraordinary musician. Even if someone failed the CSAT (Korean Gaokao), they can still (try to) go pro in Starcraft.

And insofar as schools claim that their mission is about raising mature, capable human beings who can be good citizens, the institutions necessarily need to foster developments in these other dimensions that don’t easily compress to a grade.

Helpfully, more and more education institutions give openings for these possibilities. College applications generally seek more than just a transcript to summarize one’s learnedness. Descriptions of extracurricular distinctions and personal essays of hopes and dreams are an increasingly common part of the admission process.

However, as any administrator know, the more aspects of an applicant get included, the more disproportionately energy-intensive it requires to evaluate. It’s pretty easy to have a 90% cut-off, but it’s far harder to consider who in the applicant pool is “holistically” a better fit. Adding more metrics to evaluate often creates more noise instead, hindering the aim of composing a class of students filled with Life.

In addition, more metrics are not only difficult for administrators but hard for students too. Not only do you have to get an A in every subject under the sun, you will also need to volunteer to show your compassion, start a company to show your leadership, and publish a paper to show your intellect. As any keenly prepped high school senior knows, this is an exhausting way to live. It quickly becomes an emulation of tallness often precisely at the cost of developing rich character.

Ok, so simply opening the floodgates for more metrics isn’t helpful, then what do we do? How can we get closer to the kind of lofty function of education someone like E.F. Schumacher wishes for:

“Education can help us only if it produces “whole men.” The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even the man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible): the “whole man,” in fact, may have very little detailed knowledge of facts & theories…but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of his life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from his inner clarity.”

The quote itself, I think, contains some hints for the solution. More metrics aren’t necessarily workable, in the wider sense of metric, but metrics can also be more “tall”.

To be “in touch with the center” that “stems from her inner clarity” are examples of tall metrics. It can be difficult to explicate exactly what that means, but, suppose we could accurately measure this, then surely we would like to use it.

In a sense, we are making metrics more abstract. Abstract not in the sense that it’s reductive or becomes removed (e.g. letter grade), but rather in the sense that they contain “more” (e.g. evaluating curiosity). The trade-off here, is that a reductive/simple metric is easy to measure but lossy in signal, but a more abstract/tall metric contains high signal though usually at the cost of measurability.

This description itself may sound abstract, but consider a simple example.

Suppose I want to carry as much water as possible from point A to B. To do so I have many vessels to choose from. One way I can measure which is the best vessel to use is by choosing the one with the largest area (i.e. horizontal cross-section) or I could choose the one with the largest volume. It might seem silly; obviously volume is the superior metric here. However, the largest area is not necessarily “bad”. By reducing the dimensions of measurement, just looking at which vessel is wider can often be an ok proxy for volume. We also intuit volume being better because we are equipped to understand 3-dimensional space but suppose I am a creature of flatland, I would have trouble using 3-D metrics like volume to make my choice. Volume here is an example of a “taller”, more abstract metric than area by it containing more “dimensions” without losing details of any other dimensions.

With the idea of a “taller” metric, we can reconnect our exploration around metrics with the tallness of institutions.

If an institution is able to use a diverse set of metrics, especially incorporating “taller” metrics, we can infer the institution’s tallness. Specifically, the usage of tall metrics helps us infer the institution’s ability to perceive tallness. The ability to perceive tallness is the actual/desired metric for institutional tallness.3

An entity capable of perceiving tallness has the capacity to be tall, as illustrated by the example of the difference between how volume vs area is naturally or unnaturally used as a metric by a 3D or 2D creature.

Generalizing from school admission to all forms of firms hiring, in addition to simple metrics like pay and amenities, we usually care a good deal whether the company hiring actually “cares” about its employees. The “care for its employees” part is a rather tall metric. Anyone with some years of working experience usually knows just how difficult it can be to assess a company’s ability to perceive this metric and how precious it can be when it’s done well. We also know companies try very hard to care for this metric, despite often failing, knowing that when done well, it often becomes a stronger source of motivation than lower-order incentives like salary.

Now that we are equipped with some means to recognize and evaluate institutional tallness, we can examine what tallness looks like in institutions as well as some of the challenges involved.

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Tallness in Institutions

Consider modern agriculture, a massive $10 trillion per year institution feeding billions – nothing less than a miracle of civilization.

One of the more recent expressions of this expansion in our ability to feed more people is the green revolution, as methods around industrialized agriculture is promoted and adopted in many areas of developing countries, demonstrably lifting millions out of food insecurity.

Over the last five months we have seen new evidence of their progress. Record yields, harvests of unprecedented size and crops now in the ground demonstrate that throughout much the developing world - and particularly in Asia - we are on the verge of an agricultural revolution. – Tom Vilsack, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 1968

Through the invention of synthetic fertilizer and other industrial implements, powered by globalized trade, intensive agriculture can be applied across regions relatively agnostic to local conditions. It becomes easy to replicate or scale this reliable, high-yield food production process. This is a great example of growing via the “Wide” method.

Unfortunately, this is not without costs. When something grows by a wide method, coupled with disproportionate power over the local environment, we would see rapid dominance and disturbance over the local equilibrium (e.g. highly invasive species).4 5

It is, in part, easy to replicate because the process is optimized for wide metrics like yield per acre or livestock productivity, ultimately compressible to profitability. These tend to discount or externalize less measurable qualities like ecological health over time. It leads to very valid critiques:

The Green Revolution has devastated the entire ecosystem of our society—the ecology and economy—we have lost almost all of our biodiversity. [It] is input intensive, techno-centric, resource-guzzling. It is not a cultural transformation leading to self-sufficiency. – Vandana Shiva

Understandably, a massive wide form of scaling can create externalities that may not be sensible. We can then wonder, is there a different form of scaling here that might be more sensible? What does a tall expression of agriculture look like?

Consider then the practice of permaculture, an agricultural method that is specifically focused on production methods that work in harmony with local conditions and species. Through interconnectivity and complementarity, permaculture fosters long-term resilience while improving yield.

Here’s how Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, two of the founders of the permaculture movement put it:

Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system. – Bill Mollison

Permaculture harmoniously follows nature’s intricate patterns, recognizing and embracing the wisdom encoded in natural ecosystems. Rooted in observation, it mimics the interconnected relationships and cyclical processes found in nature. – David Holmgren

Here, we have many examples of tall metrics. “Working with … nature”, “thoughtful observation … at plants and animals in all their functions”, “follows nature’s intricate patterns”, and “embracing the wisdom encoded in natural ecosystems”.

How does one “embrace” “wisdom”?? How do you measure that??

How do I even define “nature’s intricate patterns” such that I can follow them??

As the soul or beauty of a city (or most things) is often better described via poetry than propositional logic, it can be easier to “feel” the taller metrics via illustration first:

To feel something is to perceive, and often our feelings can perceive depth or tallness in ways that our thinking can not.

In the video, we can feel the expression of the permaculture “philosophy” in the logic of the presentation as well as the visuals of the garden. We can have some qualitative sense of what it means to “work with nature and embrace its wisdom” or “thoughtful observation instead of thoughtless labor”.

One could imagine significant positive impacts on food security and ecological health should every suburban house reflect this possibility. Personally, I would very much enjoy a reduced grocery bill if I could snap my finger and have such a garden accessible by my home. However, realistically, I have no idea how to implement this. The problem is that I can’t translate my feelings of “embracing nature’s wisdom” into “what seeds to buy”, “to be planted when”, “with what other species”.

I may be able to see tallness and appreciate it, but I can’t translate actions for it. I can’t build or support more of these qualitative things.6

The Challenge In Creating Tall Institutions

Does this mean we are doomed to be at the whims of vague qualities that we can’t quantify or formalize?

I don’t think so.

The starting place almost certainly involves a qualitative experience. To teach a person who’s never heard music before music notation or a flatland creature the notion of volume, we must recognize that they have to have some internalized notion or quality of Music or 3-D space respectively. Otherwise, it’d function about as well as teaching math to children who don’t understand why they are learning it.

“Math ain’t about numbers. If you think math is about numbers, you probably think that Shakespeare is all about words. You probably think that dancing is all about shoes. You probably think that music is all about notes. Math ain’t about numbers. Math is about logic, it’s about beauty, it’s about connections, it’s about how you get from one place to another.” – Cliff Stoll

Once we have some felt-senses of the qualities of a subject, we can begin to internalize the philosophy and principles that describe the subject. As we internalize, we are then equipped to create the expressions, like institutions, that reflect the philosophy in a way that has real-world impact.

However, to do so, there are two interrelated challenges to overcome. All the more challenging when the more “tall” a subject is, the more difficult these challenges become.

1. It takes time

   The garden video opens with “Welcome to my garden. After 15 years, it’s dripping with so much abundance …” 15 years!? I only have, like, a couple of those! Agriculture/horticulture is mostly a metaphor in this post to illustrate an idea, I don’t have 15 years to internalize this, I’ve got other things to worry about – like paying rent or something.

2. It takes literacy
   Like an annoying Zen master who keeps asking stupid questions like “Does a dog have a Buddha nature?” If we don’t develop literacy in the subject, we can’t understand, communicate, and learn about the rich territory the subject is describing. To deeply understand and effectively improve an institution like “America”, think about the volumes of media and history one would go through to gain literacy on its “tallness”.

Necessarily, any project or institution’s ability to perceive tallness is first set by the creator’s ability to perceive tallness. For example, if I start a garden, inexperienced and ignorant, the thrival of my garden is about as potent as the last time I tried growing tomatoes – sad, unfruitful, and dead too soon 💀. If we were to then put me in a position of influence on many such projects, let’s say, the minister of agriculture, then what’s at risk won’t just be my unfortunate tomato plant.

The taller an institution tries to be, the more it puts a demand on the creator’s ability to seed the institution with the perceptibility for tallness. Thus, to understand how to create a tall institution, we also need to understand how people learn to perceive tallness.

What separates experienced veterans and inexperienced greenhorns is the fact that the veterans have gained experience and literacy over many iterations. Fortunately, in my experience and observations, we have a natural propensity to apply ourselves. Even as soon as we begin to internalize ideas that interest us, we are naturally drawn to expressing them in our lives, whether that’s in the form of an institution or some other form of art.7

The Challenge In Maintaining Or Growing Tall Institutions

In order to maintain any institution, some form of inheritance needs to happen for its values to pass from one generation to the next.

Inheritance is also serious business. Whether it’s a dynastic line setting up an heir for an empire or simply counting on my future self to properly care for my tomato plant, only when the inheritance of values (including its metrics) succeeds can an institution be maintained. The difference can be one of decay as soon as its founder passes or a golden age lasting hundreds of years, underwriting the very history we live.

The problem with tall institutions, however, is that it is especially resistant to simplistic, dogmatic inheritance. Simply copying precedence is insufficient, one has to understand the principles from which the institutions and their founder(s) operated from.

“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover…but my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again.”

This means for a tall institution to last, it needs to:

1. Consistently cultivate literacy in a way that adapts to changing reality. 8

   Raising/training the next generation to have the capacity for this more nuanced, complex way takes time and literacy – a kind of work. Using agriculture to illustrate again, one might say that it takes more work (in the physical energy sense) to maintain an industrial farm, but it takes a different kind of intensive work (in the mental energy sense) to maintain the garden in the video above. It would be the difference between, as Bill Mollison puts it, “protracted, thoughtful observation” and “protracted, thoughtless labor”. One can maintain the industrial farm via programmed systems of machinery to maintain planting, watering, harvesting, etc, but it takes responsiveness unavailable to rigid algorithms to tend a diverse, life-filled garden – to teach this usually requires years of working with the plants, the soil, and the seasons to understand this.

2. While keeping coordination feasible amongst different actors.

   When something gets larger than one person’s capacity to manage, we have to then contend with multiple actors with differing capacities. This then gets exponentially harder as the group gets larger. Using the example of education now, we can try to foster Schumacher’s description of the “Whole Person”, but if everyone has a different model of “Whole Person”, then we hit a coordination conundrum. If each person is limited in their ability to understand other people’s literacy, then the aspect least understood becomes most fragile. In practice, this means that the teacher who cares about the mental health of students in a typical school could range from doing invisible labor all the way to being ostracized for being radical. This would be true for maintaining and even more so for growing.

Look, maintaining tallness over time is arguably one of the most difficult things in the universe simply because of entropy. As entropy wants to homogenize, local tallness is one of the most delicious things for it to erode.

As sometimes expressed in the humanities:

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times. Easy times create weak men, weak men create hard times.”

Treasuring Tallness In Institutions and Constituents

Fortunately, Life itself is plenty competitive of a force to entropy for all practical purposes.

“Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself uphill.” – Tom Robbins

Tall institutions surround us. From the skyscrapers we live into the computer I’m typing on to the languages we speak, tallness is so abundant and pervasive that it can often appear like the water we swim in. However, to the extent it’s relatively invisible (an interesting signal of the lack of ability to perceive tallness), its development and upkeep depend on those who can perceive it.9

If our ability to perceive tallness erodes, we can predict that the tallness of the institutions around us will erode too. That’s why I used education heavily as a theme in this post. Tallness in institutions and people is mutually informing. If our education itself creates flat, rather than tall, experiences, we raise a generation of people unable to perceive and inherit the tallness created by our predecessors. What results would naturally be the “hard times weak men create”.

I believe tallness is essentially, deeply beautiful. For those who see it, they can’t help but want to nurture it, cultivate it, and share that beauty with others. This is my impression of why so many institutions, from archaic bank protocols to grandmother’s kitchen, are being kept up, despite the obscurity often accompanied with preserving unperceived tallness.

The anthropologist/philosopher Gregory Bateson used to tell a story:

New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top, yes? These might be two feet square, forty-five feet long.

A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because where would they get beams of that caliber nowadays?

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be on College lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him about oaks.

The new oak beams of New College, Oxford, were installed in 1865 by Gothic Revivalist Gilbert Scott, using timbers from college estates at Great Horwood and Akely in north Buckinghamshire. The building is the oldest surviving college hall at Oxford, completed in 1386 by Bishop William of Wykeham (master mason, William Wynford). The now-windowed opening in the roof was originally to let out smoke from an open fire in the center of the hall.

And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

A nice story. That’s the way to run a culture.

Every time I’ve retold this story since I first heard it from Gregory in the 1970s, someone always asks, “What about for the next time? Has a new grove of oaks been planted and protected?” I forwarded the question to the authorities at New College—the College Archivist and the Clerk of Works. They had no idea.

– Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn

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The strategies of “Tall” vs “Wide” is quite pervasive.

In biology, for example, species like salmon might take a wide approach to reproduction, laying thousands of eggs, knowing only a fraction will survive. Different species, like the elephant, would only birth a few offspring over the course of its life, coupled with long gestation periods.

Similarly in human society, parents might focus on having many children, expecting some of them to die in childhood, some to be married off, some might seek higher education, and some to carry “the family” into the next generation. In developed countries, the practice generally involves having few children, focusing on maximizing success for each child through piano classes, SAT prep, sports teams, and all the supplementary education common to modernity. One could say that the childrearing "meta" in the modern world favors “tall”.

It is important to note that both strategies are evolutionarily valid. It is not my intent nor disposition that the “Tall” strategy is superior to the “Wide” strategy. Instead, the differentiation here of “Tallness” has been catching my attention in a particular way. There’s something profound, yet easily neglected, in the understanding of “Tallness” that I hope to illustrate. Specifically, while both are about “growing” or “scaling”, each style has diverging philosophies. This gives it an interesting contrast to examine various dimensions of life, particularly psycho-social life, which is my intent for the next few posts.

This post is the first part of examining what “Building Tall” means. I hope to give an illustrative and intuitive sense of what “Tallness” means and feels like through our notion of Cities.1

Cities – a basis for life

The very idea of a “City” is a “tall” idea.

Instead of many small villages with huts, spread over a wide area, one of the distinguishing features of “civilization” is the concentration of people and resources. The literal tallness of the buildings that constitute a city is simply a by-product of the concentration or density that reflects the conceptual “tallness” of the city.

This density permits what economists like to harp about – specialization. It contributes to the remarkable super-linear quality that cities can demonstrate.

It can be incredibly off-putting to imagine a city filled with only sameness. Everyone living in the same buildings, doing the same job, wearing the same clothes.

A hallmark of what makes a City is diversity. No matter how homogenous a city is, we’d still imagine it to have a hospital, a school, a church, etc.

In an organic sense, cities usually evolved from smaller, less dense human settlements. The existing complexity in what might have been a township usually evolves to become more complex versions of itself. The large-ish building where village folks gathered for town halls evolved into the governance building and the local water station evolved into the fire station. Naturally, as cities grow, the new train station will replace the old one, often with the old one being repurposed for something else, becoming a cultural artifact – say a farmers market built out of the old train station. This evolutionary process gives a city its history and character – it has been composed to form Life. One can discern – yes, many things have transpired here, many people have passed through here.

Cities can also be evaluated on how “Tall” they are, as a measure of their Life and complexity.

Consider these two pictures:

I’d wager that you would agree that B, the latter, is more “tall” in the sense that I am talking about here, despite the fact that the former is literally taller and more dense.

Why is this?

To be “tall” is to be imbued with complexity, with life. Tallness isn’t only density, but rather a density of coherent differences, a density of plurality, a plurality that endures.

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Consider these two photos:

How far apart do you think these two locations are from each other?

About a 15-minute walk.

When I walked through both of these scenes myself, what stunned me was how wild it was that these could exist so close to each other. By some grace of the city planners, there was a striking tranquility in the temple. The city is no longer visible once I was within the park area and I had to strain to hear the noises of the city. Incredibly, this was even so for small parks of seeming insignificance, a marvel of urban design.2

In contrast, here’s another photo that illustrates stark differences existing next to each other:

Even though both examples share the property of having two seemingly incompatible things next to each other, this one feels distinctly “wrong”.

Unlike the park and the bustling city, which has a quality of deep complementarity, the photo of the homeless screams dysergy. The former made each other more beautiful, while the latter made each other more profane. By extension, living in the environment of the former may be a balm on the soul while living in the latter would foster pathologies of ignorance.

Trickily, this incompatibility is not so simple that we could solve it simply through economic improvements. That is, even if I lift all of the homeless out of poverty and into good housing and hire people to clean up the streets, what results isn’t necessarily more “Life”; it’s more likely to look sterile.

Consider for example these photos:

And compare it to these photos:

One could say that the former, despite appearing “poorer”, still felt like it contained more life. The latter, to the extent it signals prosperity, almost appears to be a signal made by and for someone not of the city and its soul. Neither has any humans in the picture, yet we can distinctly feel more humanness existing in the former.

The life contained in the “tallness” exists in the nooks and crannies. Just like how our brain, through its folds, increases its surface area and complexity, the city that takes on layers and layers of detail gains its character. We could sense that there are stories embedded in the details; someone’s story has been through here.

With all this set, we can now assess a city (or town, etc) in terms of its “tallness”, or what Christopher Alexander would call Degrees of Life, via two means:

1. How much life is etched into the physical space

Physical space can be a reflection of the amount of life that has “left its mark” intentionally or not.

Which in the aggregate, assuming the plurality is complementary, can form cities like this:

Or fail, where plurality becomes conflicting and expresses itself like this:

2. How much life is embedded into a psychic space

Psychic space here means the dimension where we assess how much meaning has been embedded into some “space”. We can ask questions like “how much exist in the distance between the gaze of lovers?” or “how much does one star on a wall mean?”

When done well, the city reflects deep life and humanness:

However, sterility can instead be the result, where even if density exists, meaning and connection does not:

Broadly speaking then, the denser we are able to pack life coherently, the taller it is. To pack life into a space though, we usually need to let life flow through it. The London Covid Memorial would lose its density if we start vandalizing it with fake hearts and fake stories, even though we’d be adding more hearts. A building needs people living through it to gain its character.

Inconveniently, this all takes time. Especially with scaling pressures, say an influx of resources – people, gold, oil, etc. From the perspective of governors, it’s easier to manage a city through the zoning of a residential area, an industrial area, and a commercial area. The clarity allows easier management; label a thing according to its category and put the cube in the square hole. By separating them, the residential people wouldn’t be complaining about a factory in their lives, and we know to put a school in the residential area and not the industrial area. We take advantage of specialization while addressing the needs of each group. This is important! I can’t even run a company without needing to form departments after some tens of people, never mind a city with millions!

Unfortunately, this also then creates silo’ing. If I dump industrial waste with enough degrees removed from a residential zone, the residents would have little reason to care about what harm I might be creating. In contrast, if my factory was within or near the residential zone, I bet my neighbors would have some pretty strong opinions if I started bellowing toxic fumes right over their heads. The segmentation disrupts the interconnectivity of the city’s ecology. It would be like saying: ok the frogs can all live in this pond, and then the fish can live in that meadow over there – about as fragile as the marine section of an Asian supermarket.

When silo’ed, we lose the ability to mingle and discourse, and thus lose out on the very benefit of the city itself – cross-pollinating between differences, differences that get experienced as serendipity.

My understanding of how urban planning has evolved is that there’s now a significant appreciation for “mixed-use developments” – recognizing that multiple purposes embedded in a given space allow life to flourish. People will adapt and exapt creative uses out of any given space.

From mom-and-pop stores to busking performers, it is precisely where we don’t define how a space should be used that life emerges.3

The dinner table is for more than the consumption of sustenance. The town square for more than just pigeons. The bedroom for more than sleeping. Et cetera.

All these examples can be summarized in frames found in the study of Ecology. An ecosystem is more resilient and adaptive when it is more interconnected. When we build our living environments with interconnectivity in mind, we create more suitable living environments.

If we were to imagine the social fabric somewhat literally, one might imagine a homogenous social environment as a flimsy, homogenous sheet of fabric; undifferentiated and easy to tear:

As the social environment starts to gain character, perhaps the local hospital is known for its compassion and community programs, the fabric gains details. It starts to accrue some interesting designs and the needlework becomes more refined. Parts of it would have more stitching, creating regions of strength.

Eventually, as the social environment deepens in complexity, perhaps the hospital partners closely with a university, developing its artistic production, while the laboratory nearby produces innovative technology, the fabric gains heft and depth. It forms an intricate, beautiful piece of lasting art.

The more purposes or meaning we embed into a “space”, the more it is potentiated for life. Conveniently, humans (and life) are naturally drawn to adding purpose to a space that permits it. However, it is also humans that define and through it often confine a space to specific activities. The school is for classes, the hospital for doctors and patients, the factory for production, etc. Through the act of defining the singular purpose of a given space, our imagination is subtly, yet forcefully, invited to cease: “This is the classroom, it is for learning. If you want to play, do it outside!” Scarier still, when we are trained under this mode of categorization, whole humans increasingly get categorized too: Mr. Bell is a teacher who teaches math at school – to find out that Mr. Bell is a neighbor would be mighty strange.

We can not do without the act of categorizing. It helps us organize. Yet, to categorize, or to differentiate, does not require the separation of the categorized object’s other qualities. The sports arena may be converted to a basketball court one night, a concert hall, another. Its multi-purpose nature is what gives it its tallness. The concertgoer and the sports fan can both ascribe their different relationships to the arena, contributing to its tallness. In that tallness, that concertgoer and the sports fan may end up crossing paths, forming new relationships only possible through the interconnectivity inherent in “Tallness”.

A sense of place is built up, in the end, from many little things too, some so small people take them for granted, and yet the lack of them takes the flavor out of the city … The remarkable intricacy and liveliness of downtown can never be created by the abstract logic of a few men. Downtown has had the capability of providing something for everybody only because it has been created by everybody. — Jane Jacobs, Downtown Is For People, 1958

In addition to the “everybody”, referring to citizens who build up a city, another class of actors is left out of the picture – institutions. A significant influence that rivals the people themselves, institutions are also an inevitable feature of spaces with tallness. I will go into this in the next part.

Meanwhile, as part of the “everyone”, each mark we leave on our environment is an act of building it. From our private rooms to our public spaces, we create the tall city by etching our life into its spaces.

To be “tall” is to be imbued with complexity, with life. Tallness isn’t only density, but rather a density of differences, a density of plurality, a plurality that endures.

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I wrote to and for two distinct audiences, each with a different pretense: One for the community I live and work in, as an exercise in presenting my “full-spectrum” self, and the other, for the community that I teach in, a playful protest against writing self-introductions.

Despite the angle from the two pretenses being different, they shared one thing in my presentation:

I was conducting an experiment – an experiment of presentation, and my inner workings.

I somewhat arbitrarily set a weekly publishing cadence and proceeded to write. Before I knew it, ~60,000 words and half a year had gone by and I’m typing along on my 22nd post.

In a sense, I’m surprised. I rarely wrote publicly. I did not expect to have a blog and did not have a significant writing habit. For me, it’s empirically unprecedented.

In a different sense though, I’m not at all surprised. While I held the writing initiative lightly by framing it as an experiment, I also held that it was to be a serious foray.1 I had a strong intuition that the necessary ingredients were in place for a sustained writing habit to form.

The nature of the experiment, and my “serious” relationship to it, was not about whether I produced any good writing. Any such product is the lag measure of a process, and I am interested in that process or the “Engine of Creation”.

I had a hypothesis that if a number of ingredients were in place, I could predict with an unusual degree of confidence, that a particular creative project is likely to succeed. The writing experiment, which became this substack, is the medium for testing the hypothesis.

The Engine Of Creation

Goal setting is not so easy. New Year’s Resolutions and their notorious base rate of failure are some of the most glaring examples of: Generally when we intend to do something, especially something that might be complex and require follow-through, we often fail.

Consider a classic goal like “I want to lose weight this year” (or learn the piano or make new friends, etc). What kind of assessments can we make about the way that the goal is set such that we can make predictions about the likelihood of success?

One axis of this is surely in the structure of the goal itself. Is it SMART, for instance.

Another axis is some character assessment. Does the person with the goal express it with conviction and passion: Do they clearly want it or do they just think it’s a nice goal to have? Does the person illustrate a history of successful goal setting, etc.

In execution, we want to see how the person relates to unexpected occurrences. When other matters get in the way, are they likely to “triumph” over the obstacles?

Should they “accomplish” the goal, we may evaluate whether the person has cultivated some new pattern of living, rather than a short-term habit. Perhaps after losing weight, the person immediately drops all fitness-related activities. In this case, we may predict re-gaining of weight as a result. On the other hand, they may not have lost as much weight as some original plan intended, though it’s clear they’ve developed a new lifestyle pattern and thus we can predict they will likely continue to lose weight (insofar as that’s desirable).

From state A (wanting to lose weight) to state B (having lost weight), time – or more humanly, Life – lies in between. Is the path from A to B a neutral one? Or a path full of resistance? Or is it a path that gets easier and smoother with each step?

By assessing these factors, we gain predictive power over whether people or institutions are likely to accomplish what they set out to do.

In this case, I’m using my writing process as a case study for explicating the factors that led me to believe that the initiative was set up for success.

Specifically, each of these factors feeds into each other in such a way that an “Engine for Creation” forms, and provided that the engine is well functioning, creative results can be predicted, stumbles can be diagnosed, and the joy of creation can be built upon.

The Case of Writing

Being Clear About What I Want
“I want to start a blog” was not a particularly enticing goal. Early on, I reflected that writing was a medium through which I wished to: {Seek Joy and Aliveness, Explore Identity, Hone Writing as a Skill, Write as a Recording Medium, Meditate on Business Models, Do A More Tractable Project, Relate With Audience}. By baking in as many distinct “Wants”, I open myself to many axes of potential return.2 One could evaluate “Is writing a good medium for gaining traction on these Wants?” Which, in my case, all of these Wants and their traction can be rated as positively satisfied.3 Notably, this set also doesn’t account for how each of those Wants evolves over time, or new Wants that might be added in (e.g. writing as a medium for studying interesting subjects), theeimportant factors in ongoing evaluation. Regardless of precision here though, the writing project has been rather productive! Insofar as I feel positive and that for the areas that I’m less satisfied, I also have distinct hope for improvement, we could start to get the impression that: assuming no superior idea comes along and that I continue to have these Wants, I can predict I will continue to write.

Cultivate A Potent Source
“I want to start to write” is intractable if I don’t have a good sense of what I want to write and whether what I write will matter to my audience.4 If I don’t have a source from which good content, good with respect to my enjoyment and an audience, flows, then naturally when the source dries up, I would no longer have things to write about.5

• To verify whether such a source is potent invites a sense of trust-in-self. It can be literal, like a built-up list of “writings I want to do”, which is a proxy for how potent the source is. Even more directly, from our moment-to-moment experience, one could sense just how easefully and frequently good-feeling ideas flow through one’s body. For me, it looks like trying to hold a passive intention of “interesting things to write about”, and as I go through life, trying to notice how common ideas would pop up as a result. Usually, the more trivial the trigger from life, the more I feel confident the source is potent. Examples of these trivial triggers can look like Issue 2, Issue 3, or What’s Lost In A Problem Solved.

• To verify whether such a source is relevant to an audience requires means for feedback. This usually requires some significant investigation of how posts have landed for people in ways beyond engagement numbers. Fortunately, in my case, I get to teach as part of my job to an audience that represents a reasonable slice of my desired audience. Building curriculum and workshops for me involves a similar loop (i.e. what ideas are interesting to me and potentially interesting to students, craft a presentation for it, and get feedback for whether it worked well). With an existing parallel feedback channel, based on student feedback, I can be reasonably confident that I can form “good” content. The question is more so a matter of whether I can deliver content effectively via the medium of writing.

The more confident I am in the potency of my wellspring of content and their fit, the more I can predict that I will ongoingly have material to write about and practice on.

Integrating External Conflicts
Like the fitness example above, writing is also the type of endeavor that often gets “distracted” by other things. “I’m tired tonight” or “My child/work/partner requires my attention more right now” are not just difficult to avoid, they are unavoidable for long-term projects. The question is, when competing commitments come up, do they end up conflicting or do they end up complementing. This may sound strange – surely competing commitments inevitably trade off against each other? In this case, the aim is orienting one’s perception towards how the competing commitment(s) itself can clarify Wants and feed the source. For example, my content often pertains to communication, cognition, and collaboration; competing commitments in my life often become the precise inspiration I need to find “the angle” on intrapersonal or interpersonal ideas that I am chewing on.6

Creativity doesn’t thrive on emptiness, nor does it thrive on overwhelm. We need an optimal range of stress to stimulate us into creativity. External conflicts, when managed well (a big assumption, to be fair), can create the precise kind of creative pressure (e.g. sadness, frustration, joy, etc) that finally zaps disparate thoughts into coherent, powerful, expressions. In fact, I have found, that the greater the creative pressure, the more it can pull writing that I didn’t even know I had in me. Some examples of this include: Don’t Put Your Eggs In One Worldview – born from feeling frustrated that I couldn’t dialogue with someone I cared about, or Helping Alice – born from a day of feeling despair from some real-life situations.

Integrating Internal Conflicts
Not only is the external universe set to disrupt our intent to do creative work, but all too often, our internal universe does too. Perhaps: “You just missed last week and now you want to miss this week too? That’s how you lose a habit!” Or maybe “Last week’s post was too trivial, you gotta write a serious topic this time or people will think you’re a 🤡!”. And for many creators “You aren’t getting engagement quite like you used to. Clearly, your quality is going down man. Clearly, you weren’t meant to be creative – go get a real job!”

For some convoluted reasons, our inner world can often be filled with fear. Most of us learned to manage those fears by adopting the “inner critic”. That part of us then employs every strategy it knows to coerce ourselves into what it thinks we want, ultimately unproductively. Regardless of the line of work, it can be helpful to have some medium to practice relaxing the inner critic and seek a different source of motivation.

There are proxies to get a sense of how well we are doing along this. If I fail to post for a week, would I feel anxious about it? Or would I retain a sense of trust and discernment that this disruption is likely not undermining the overall pattern?7 Every moment during the creative process is an opportunity for introspection – am I enjoying this, or do I feel a quality of “forcing it”? Where more and more moments of the creative process are fueled by joy, then each subsequent moment is inherently more appetizing. It’s easy to seek after what we want when inner coercion relaxes – we want it after all!8 When I was writing When One Is Holding A Hammer Part 3, I was feeling more “forcing” than I’d liked. In this case, I accepted and pushed through anyway. If this experience kept showing up though, I’d start to be concerned. In contrast, writing When One Is Holding A Hammer Part 2 felt incredibly enjoyable and smooth. Not too surprisingly, the engagement numbers also reflect that in this case.

Set Up An Ecology Of Healthy Incentives
Goals like “writing publicly” or “losing weight” tend to have some objective metrics of success – am I posting regularly, am I growing my following, etc. The problem is that these metrics are often never helpful to follow directly. In systems theory terms, feedback in these systems is noisy and has lag. A few good workouts in a row don’t immediately change one’s physique; a particularly viral post isn’t an indication that one suddenly became a better writer. Instead, we often gain far more traction in systems with long feedback loops with second-order signals like “I loved the way this workout made me feel” or “This post made my partner happy, even though no one subscribed because of it.” These are not signals of “Am I closer to accomplishing my objective". Instead, they are all about “Is this objective worth striving for” and “Am I enjoying myself in the journey, independent of the results?”

This is why many fitness businesses harp about community, despite how “seeing like a state” makes community an elusive phenomenon for institutions – community shows up on bottom lines after all.
People start because they want results. People continue because they have community.

While I have some vague attraction/intention to eventually turning my writing into a notable publication, that attraction alone isn’t a suitable source for powering a creative process that ought not to be confined with a goal too definite.9 Where the process of creation itself is incentivized from multiple angles of feedback that enforces the system’s continuity, rather than its success, then we can be more confident in its longevity (and naturally, its likelihood of eventual success, whatever that is). A good example of this includes Love Letter To Dota and Issue 6, both of which I wrote primarily for my partner to understand me better, or Teach Them How To Say Good Bye, which I wrote as an adjacent way of speaking to some of my students. A different angle also includes Issue 1, which I continue to love because I wrote it to myself first and foremost.

Verify Flow And Evolve Organically
If we discern that many (or even all) of these factors are in place, we can then run tests to verify the capability and stability of this Creation Engine. Are the assumptions we are making about ourselves and the environment accurate?

I started to occasionally write privately for a few close collaborators around 2020. I was reading philosophy and started believing I could explain the universe 🙃. I noticed that the flow of writing felt good when certain experiential qualia emerged – where I felt like my mind was “charged” and connections would click together around a particular theme – I could sit down for 2 hours and out pop a draft that was “not half bad”. During this period, I started to sense that some of the elements I’ve described here are starting to hook up. In 2023, I started writing privately, moderately frequently, usually aimed at expressing certain ideas for specific collaborators, and that gave me a clear sense that this Engine was beginning to hum. I intuited that if some circumstantial things were aligned, like the pretenses above, I could probably write regularly, enjoyably, and even effectively.

When we align these factors in relation to a goal, I would argue that we have set ourselves up for success in a robust way. To achieve complex goals that require long-term planning, while not simplistic, does need traction, which often matters more than the difficulty of the goal itself. A stimulating challenge can ignite our vitality while an intractable challenge leaves us feeling powerless and anxious.

With an engine here, we can develop an intuitive sense of “readiness” relative to the goal and a diagnostic frame for evaluating why we seem to be going nowhere when we try to press the gas pedal (hint: probably because we’re secretly pressing down the brake somewhere too).

Most importantly, the creative act itself is one that fosters vitality and enjoyment, feeding onto itself into each iteration, leading to Creation and Creator in a harmonious flow.10

It’s because the Creation-Creator harmony seems valuable and important that despite some of the ingredients that make this engine function taking a long time to foster, the pursuit seems worth it. Fortunately, the Engine is also a generalizable frame for motivation, though to generalize it, I’d like to do a pivot on the metaphor.

Rather than a mechanistic metaphor like an “Engine” of creation, I’d like to switch to a more organic metaphor:

A Creation “Garden”

A mechanistic metaphor is often helpful for analysis and optimization. The organic metaphor is often far more suitable for creativity itself because the creative process is an ecological one. It takes its own time. This is to say that even if I optimize the womb for growing an embryo, it is still the embryo that needs to do the developing and that takes time and ongoing nurturing.

When I used the notion of ingredients being in place, as if I’ve readied a chemical reaction to be activated, it seems more beneficial for the overall process if I imagined that the “garden” has reached an appropriate degree of fertility. The soil ecology has been tested to be good. The climate is shifting in favor of planting.

The garden metaphor also foregrounds the garden-gardener relationship. In dynamic co-evolution, a garden would never grow exactly as the gardener intends, and necessarily the gardener would need to update and evolve their vision, resulting in adjustments. I may have set out to write, but perhaps end with a podcast, it does not undermine the undercurrent of creative expression.

The garden metaphor also tends to show its strengths in coordination. While this post has focused on the notion of an individual achieving some goal. The same notion of a creation engine or garden can be applied to evaluating groups of people achieving a goal as well. A group of people with more complex interconnected Wants can highlight further just how important these elements can be. If I wanted to run a magazine from which many may write, we would want to understand how these ingredients sit for everyone on the team.

In this personal case of writing though, the past 6 months were one of the first steps to testing the fertility of the garden – does it reliably bear fruits (new posts)? Concluding that the garden is productive and has inertia to remain so, I’d like to put my attention next on a specific area of the garden – quality.

As I reviewed some of my older posts, I noticed a difference in quality between earlier and more recent posts. I seem to be getting better at writing! This is great and I’d like to focus on this more deliberately.

Pragmatically, many posts so far have been released despite my feeling 30%-60% satisfied. I’d like to see what changes if I aim for around 80% satisfied instead. It’s less so that I’m interested in perfection, as much as what I write about tend to be ideas quite sacred to me and I’d like to do them better justice. Fortunately, many of these ideas will be revisited in future posts, so I’m not worried that perfectionism will get in the way of completion.

Nevertheless, to explore this, my attention would need to change and naturally posting schedule would evolve as well. While I would still intend a weekly posting cadence, I’d like to work ahead of schedule so I have time to round out posts better, rather than write and publish all in one week.

In the meantime, I shall find out along with you what I will be producing in this next phase.

P.S. For those interested in building goals in the vein of what I’m describing here, some friends run these 5-hour goal crafting workshops that come from a similar spirit. If you are interested, consider checking it out.

Every so often, I’m asked a question like “Should I go to college A or college B?”

I’ve always found myself somewhat confounded by this. Not only because I dropped out of a Canadian university, so I hardly know about US colleges. Instead, something about the shape of the question itself bugs me.

Surely between Choice A and Choice B, there is a choice that is “better” than the other right? Surely, one choice will be a better fit, yield more of what I value, and lead to less regret than the other?

If we were in a deterministic world where we can have complete information, then this would have to be true. Though, that’s certainly not the world we are in.

Not only do we not have complete information, but for many decisions, we can’t even be certain about how much information we don’t have. Any attempt to gain more information to increase the chance of making the “right” decision is useful but seldom conclusive.

But we can at least build a probabilistic model to account for incomplete information. This way we can still improve our decisions based on evidence … right?

Here, it’s useful to distinguish two classes of decisions that we make. One where the value of a decision is pre-defined and one where the value of a decision is under-defined.

In the pre-defined case, we can think of a context like poker. Many decisions are made in poker, under incomplete information. However, one thing about the context is clear: the value of the decisions. This means that while I may not know how exactly to do so, I know that maximizing the amount of chips in my possession when I end the game is unambiguously the objective. The game’s value function is defined, which means that uncertainty in terms of incomplete information can be compressed into probabilistic reasoning like "pot odds", distilling theoretically optimal plays. There are many such cases from Chess to Monopoly, corresponding well to James Carse’s notion of Finite Games. We know what the objective is, thus what is valuable, and the only uncertainty is how best to achieve it.

In the under-defined case, decisions are usually made in complex environments, which inconveniently include many of our most important life choices. Which school should I go to? Which career should I pursue? Who should be my partner? Where should I live? In these questions, the objective of the game is either unclear (e.g. how could I know where I should live given: climate change, changing geopolitics, social scene, etc.) or far too abstract (e.g. I’d like to be happy). The objective(s) resists formal modeling and leaves us with conflicting intuitions with not only the uncertainty of success but also the uncertainty of what success should even look like.

The pre-defined case is a relatively well-studied subject. I’m interested in how to make better decisions in the latter, including wrestling with its nebulosity so that we can derive some nuggets of formalization that could inform our intuition.

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In decision-making within these under-defined contexts, I think it’s helpful to at least start with the acknowledgment that this can feel scary. It’s hard to think critically about a subject when we are scared or anxious. These decisions often represent significant commitments, and in the modern environment of abundant choice, we are all too clear about the opportunity costs of such choices.1 Despite this post’s purpose not being one of working out psychological blocks around choice-anxiety, it is often the essential first step before going further. Otherwise, we risk our own anxiousness grasping for certainty in such a way that we lose sight of what we care about.

Using “Which school is better” as an example, I want to try to outline a different approach from the usual paradigm of “increasing confidence in making the correct choice between A and B”. Instead, I’d like to propose:

“Increasing confidence in landing in a satisfying world, for either the decision A or B.”

Here’s what I mean.

Suppose I am to decide between School A and School B, and for the sake of illustration, we close off the possibility of any third choice C (e.g. not going to school at all). Instead of thinking that I’m faced with a binary choice of A or B, each with a corresponding and distinct future, we recognize that there are many futures associated with A or B.2

This is to say that if I choose A, I could have worlds where I might meet my best friend, find a great mentor or become depressed, and so on, including any combinations of these possible events. The same could be said for B. This is because by choosing a school, I am choosing a context that shapes my future choices, a context that contains many possible worlds.

Despite this possibly being obvious, big choices like this can often feel like a single thing. Going to Harvard can feel just like “going to Harvard” – especially for an incoming student with high uncertainty, all of those futures can feel compressed into one “Harvard path/future”. However, as any alum could probably share, there are many ways to “do” Harvard and there’s a great degree of diversity from how a school is experienced and how the future pans out.

Zooming in on School A as a choice, we might have something like:

Each of these distinct lives will become the basis on which one would evaluate if a correct decision is made. Some future versions of ourselves will look back and feel deeply glad about our choice. Other future versions of ourselves would wonder what the alternative could have been like in regret. Perhaps like this:

Now, in addition to wondering whether A or B is the right choice, we can also evaluate how likely we are to end up in the “Satisfying Worlds” of A. After all, we may discern with some confidence that School A might have more satisfying worlds than B and thus feel inclined to choose A.

Expanding to include B this time could look like this:

With B in the picture, we can now ask some nice questions like:3

• Which of School A or School B offers the greater possibility space? How confident am I in this?

• How likely am I to be in a Satisfying World given that I choose School A or B?

• Which choice offers the largest amount of satisfying worlds or the smallest amount of unsatisfying worlds?

• How well am I capturing all possible satisfying/unsatisfying worlds?

It’s a very different question to ask someone at School A: “Do you think I should go to School A?” versus “Tell me about how many ‘satisfying worlds’ you see at this school”.4 These questions allow for more rigorous investigation, with distinct categories of information to seek, in order to form a more complete picture.

In contrast, the more common way of comparing two options, where we determine several parameters and compare them (prestige, tuition, average income after graduation, etc) is mostly suggestive of the option space but does not offer concrete perspectives.5 This is especially exacerbated when every school markets slogans and qualities that approximate “Granting Our Alumni The Brightest Future”. Instead, evaluating by seeking out distinct futures invites us to qualify those lofty claims. Just what kind of Bright Futures are they offering? How easy is it for me to find out about these futures or are they all behind a veneer of marketing?

What emerges is a picture that de-emphasizes the binary choice of A or B. Instead, we foreground the evaluation of the various worlds in A and B, and how to land in a satisfying one, almost regardless of the choice itself. This is because “winning” exists in both A and B, and we are looking to maximize the likelihood of being in the green area or minimize the area of red, regardless of A or B6:

Now, one might say that while this may grant more ways to investigate the choice, it doesn’t necessarily bring clarity, so how am I supposed to choose between A and B? To that, I would say “the game” isn’t even to choose between A and B. Sure, at some deadline associated with a decision we will find ourselves in one of the universes A or B and not both.7 That fork will come and pass one way or another. We are looking for “Satisfying Worlds” not the “Correct Choice”:

We care about being satisfied with our choices and by extension our life. This is not about grasping onto the hope that by making the correct choice, we would be finally, decisively “happy” or “free” or “belonged”. If this is what’s driving the decision, it’s recommended that we return to the earlier mentioned first step, recognizing that we are probably scared and addressing that. It can be quite scary!

By focusing on satisfying worlds, we are instead loading/potentiating our minds to be sensitive to subsequent paths for either choice. Like a standup comic who has run 100 variations of the same routine, they will be able to improvise based on the audience with an immense degree of creativity, we are improving our ability to improvise in either the worlds of A or B.8

Notably, this model is cognitively demanding. Rather than settling for some easy-to-determine criteria that ChatGPT could do about as well, we are constantly searching for details-within-worlds and worlds-yet-considered. This makes each choice made under this model somewhat undecidable, that is to say, we can keep on considering possible worlds forever – amusingly even beyond the point the decision has even been made.9

For me though, cognitively demanding as it might be (especially when starting off), this is a skill that can be honed and is worth honing. Specifically, it’s a “learning engine” that I believe is natural to human learning/cognition. Intuitively, this shouldn’t be difficult to imagine. A general who has studied many battles (by leading or studying) learns to disseminate the patterns in those battles as bits to recompose into creative new strategies. A good general wouldn’t be satisfied with simply having learned stratagems, but rather to keep considering all the ways things can go wrong (or right). Over time, this forms something vaguely labeled as Wisdom, where they gain the ability to approach new and old contexts creatively.

The honed ability here is what allows us to confidently interface with uncertainty – including decisions like choosing between a school. By confidently I mean the solidity in the general’s ability to face a new battle and feel in their body a sense of “I don’t know what’s going on yet, but I expect I can figure it out” – self-efficacy or “trust in the self”. This is why the fear of these decisions, if present, is important to recognize first. In the case of “going to Harvard or not”, a rising freshman might find it intimidating whereas a graduating senior might find it rich and thought-provoking. The difference is in this quality of self-efficacy, and as we gain this sense of trust in ourselves, decisions transform in nature.

When faced with a choice, someone who fears all options except the “correct” one and someone who trusts they can navigate any world is not making the same decision.

Fortunately, we can hone this skill, and in fact, we already do this naturally. With each decision, we naturally evaluate how well we did and update on this information. The key is to consciously purpose it towards how well we evaluate worlds. Perhaps we are glad of the choice, indicating that we are in a satisfying world. Did we foresee this world ahead of time? Why or why not?

Every “mistaken” decision is then incorporated into an evaluation of why we did not effectively foresee unsatisfying worlds or navigate towards satisfying worlds. We then gain valuable information on how to model more nuanced worlds for subsequent decisions. In fact, we may discover that most of the time, the “mistake” lies in reality having details that were totally out of what we can conceive of before.

In this model, we are no longer even minimizing regret, but rather transcending regret – or Post-Regret. We can still have thoughts shaped like “I wish I did that differently”, but rather than regret, we feed these thoughts into the learning engine that informs our subsequent evaluations of satisfying worlds, building our ability to navigate more and more worlds, thus developing self-efficacy.

It’s worth noting that this model is meant to be compatible with two assumptions about the nature of Choice.

• The first is that choices are not made in perfect agency (i.e. a perfect individual rational agent). We are embedded (i.e. in relationship), and sometimes we don’t get to choose what we want.10 This helps us make sure that however the choice pans out, we are equipped to navigate it well.

• The second is that each decision is not a conclusive choice. The choice continues in a continuum of choosing, each shaping the next. To think that one choice (like getting into the right college or job or romantic partner) will definitively conclude some quest for satisfaction is both epistemically inaccurate and ineffective.

Returning to the concrete example: “so, like, School A or School B?”

The answer, if this model works well, should increasingly sound like: “I don’t know! But I do know that both schools seem really great!”

I swear, this really is a real solution lol. The amusing part of this “solution” is that it solves not the content of the problem but the context of the problem – it solves the feeling of “there is a problem here” from the problem. The content remains, but is transformed: School A vs School B is no longer in a context of scarcity (i.e. one of the many choices must be best) but rather one of abundance (i.e. many of the many choices are great).

Solving problems in abundance is very different in nature than solving problems in scarcity. We are ever increasing the attractive options we face, which can feel overwhelming – necessitating a set of skills quite different from more common reductive modes of decision-making. This warrants an expansion in a separate piece of writing, but illustratively improv is a good example of where such skills are built. “Problem-solving” in improv should taste very different than normal problem-solving because we are firmly in the Infinite Game. Since life is also an infinite game, practicing solving abundance-based problems is certainly a worthwhile endeavor.

Finally, not only do I think it’s possible to learn this, but teaching this should be well within the possible. The pedagogy still seems poorly understood (i.e. I barely scratched the formal possibilities here) and poorly distributed (i.e. we don’t see this in regular education). This is why various jobs that require interfacing with complexity and uncertainty like business management or military special forces often select for a certain “je ne sais quoi” that is difficult to train for – call it “Leadership” or “Ability to Problem Solve” or “Hacker Mindset”.

Researching and implementing learning engines like this in “contexts for learning” (e.g. businesses, schools, relationships, etc) constitutes a good portion of my work. If you are interested, consider reaching out.

Time is a precise thing.

We are able to measure down to picoseconds (that’s 10^-12 seconds), and this precision gives us industrial orchestrations that are nothing short of magic.

The computer I'm writing on can run at 3 Gigahertz, that's 3 billion cycles per second.

The plane I'm flying on has jet engine turbines spinning at 20,000 rounds per minute.

All these processes are controlled to such a degree that if my flight across a continent is delayed by even an hour, I would be upset, along with hundreds of other passengers/staff connected to the consequences of such a delay.

Yet, even as we gain profound control of our universe's ticking tocks, we also seem to lose our understanding of time.

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The Greeks have several different terms for time, most commonly:

Kronos, the time our mind is familiar with, trickles by with atomic accuracy, second by second, all fungible, and all objectively passing by as the universe ticks forward uncaringly.

Kairos, the "event" time that our body is most familiar with, is a radically different notion that orients from a relative or contextual relationship with time – a subjective experience of time.

Consider the following statements:

• "He waited in agony, for what felt like grueling hours, just to wait for the bathroom stall to free up."

• "The hours flew by, as both of them lost themselves in the joy of sharing a wonderful date."

• "Years slip by, and before she could notice, her daughter has already become a grown young woman."

• "We only have one month to deliver on our revenue quota or we won't be able to raise more funding."

• "Despite having resolved to wait for at least 20 more minutes, when he looked up again, only a measly 10 minutes had passed. The end to class felt asymptotically far away."

Each of these statements portrays time in rather strange ways. How could years "slip by"? How could hours be "grueling" and "flying by"? Not to mention, one of those is literally claiming minutes as hours – that's simply false!

Yet, it is likely that most of those statements felt perfectly natural to a reader. We should be able to feel in ourselves some corresponding experiences, ones that inform us of how it feels to be in the shoes of the person having the experience.

Which is to say, while the universe may uncaringly pass from one moment to the next, we – the beings experiencing those moments – would experience those moments in relativity.

It's why if someone said: "Man, what's so incredible about 127 hours, I do 127 hours literally every week", we might be at a loss for words.

The two kinds of time, Kronos (objective time) and Kairos (subjective time) are useful for their respective purposes. Their domain roughly corresponds to how physics (and more broadly the natural sciences) understands time and how literature (and more broadly the humanities) understand time.

Mixing up their uses can be comical, dangerous, and perhaps creative too.

Imagine how bizarre it would be if a special forces team, as they get ready to assault an objective, instead of synchronizing by their watches, synchronized by their heartbeat? That is, rather than assault at 0600 hours, we'll assault when everyone has reached 100 heartbeats. That'd be a disaster!

Since everyone experiences time differently, coordinating on subjectivity can be fickle and irritating. We often need to count on objective time to do things together. Imagine if a music band were playing together not by the music's time signature, but just by whatever they feel like, we'd have a disaster again!

... Except, maybe? The time signature of a piece of music may not be pre-agreed on, but that doesn't necessarily prevent a band from triangulating some shared or complementary tempo. It may not be as strict as "the piano teacher who insists you should play exactly by what the sheet says" yet, musicality can nonetheless arise, whether that's in a modern jazz band or a tribal drum circle.

Similarly, the special forces team may not coordinate especially well on an assault based on heartbeat count, but a team that is skilled at synchronizing heartbeats probably gains competency on other fronts, like greater solidarity and emotional intelligence. Despite a vocation built on adversarial violence, elite military units seem to also agree that these competencies are important.

When we can incorporate "measures" of subjective time, we gain additional forms of evaluation and coordination.

Once, when I was in a lecture, I was asked to respond to a question the lecturer asked. As I responded, my heart was pounding against my ribcage, with all the strength of "if I don't answer eloquently, everyone will think I'm a failure!" In the maybe 30 seconds it took to answer the question, I can certainly tell you it didn't feel like 30 seconds. Over time, this changed, in a later, similar circumstance, I was asked a question again, only for 30 seconds to glide on by. I noticed that doing the same thing didn't take as many heartbeats this time. Even though objectively, the same amount of time has passed, it was the difference in heartbeats that measured the "time" that mattered.

Consider the difference between an airport policy that mandates "all vehicle drop-offs have a strict 3-minute goodbye time allowance" versus "all drop-offs have an allowance for 1 eye-gaze worth of time".

What about the difference between starting a meeting within 5 minutes of the scheduled start time versus starting a meeting after 10 deep breaths from the first n-arrivals?

Or how about we assign 10 pieces played with genuine joy rather than 2 hours of practicing an instrument?

Strange as some of these may sound, how dysfunctional would these really be? What would instead be gained as a result? What kind of society would be needed for such policies to be functional? What kind of society would such policies create?

Throughout much of human history, it's probably more normal to operate by these strange policies rather than our objective-time-based policies. Despite some of our best efforts, retained in our rituals, we fortunately have not eliminated these kairos-based time markers. Whether that's in the appreciation before a meal, the holidays that haven't lost their meaning, or the opening/closing ceremony of an event, a practice in the Kairos mode persists.

To be clear, illuminating and celebrating the value of Kairos is not a denigration of Kronos. Much of civilization's benefits are downstream of our ability to relate to time as an objective, consistent phenomenon. To throw out Kronos would make as little sense as denying the effects of gravity. However, I hope to illustrate that each mode of relating to time comes with its respective literacy, each requiring the development of fluency.

Our lives can functionally tick by within a Kronos-oriented order: Graduation, Job, Marriage, Children, Retirement ... However, precisely in the moments when it matters most to us, Kairos inevitably take over, and without literacy in that subjective mode, we may miss life as it flashes by us.

After all, when we are in our final moments, it won't be the seconds ticking by, but the precious meaning anchored in that last heartbeat.

Uber Eats sent me a notification a while back that got stuck in my mind. It went something like this:

“Cure your cravings! Order a bite with free delivery!”

I am certainly interested in curing my cravings. I’m pretty big on the Buddha’s words about Cravings being the source of suffering. His method, though … is rather dry and laborious. I didn’t know Uber was also in the Craving-Curing business, and it sure sounds like they are offering an easier solution to the problem of cravings. Finally, after two millennia, we’ve disrupted Buddhism.

On-demand food delivery is a rather incredible service. Throughout human history (or at least the recent part after agriculture), this type of service is strictly available for royalty, and even they have petty restrictions. “Sorry Your Majesty, we are in a famine right now, and there simply isn’t any pomelos to grace your mouth.” To that, the King or Queen in question doesn’t really get to rebut, perhaps at most something like “Well tax another goat from the peasants and sacrifice it to the gods that we may be rid of this famine sooner.”

Today, we get to choose from more restaurants than a Homo Sapien can comfortably fathom, helpfully tagged with “deals” or “comfort food”, in cuisines foreign and familiar, all to satisfy our craving at whatever time of day (or night). Fortunately, our wonderful market function reveals that there exists a labor class who wants(?) to make more income by driving around, picking up food from disparate places, just to put it at our door.

What is the problem being solved here?

Is it to democratize the luxury once only available to the well-off?

Or perhaps: Celebrate humanity’s culinary beauty and diversity by making it more accessible?

In this case, Uber Eats’ mission statement appears to be:

make eating well effortless at any time, for anyone.

I mean, I like that very much: I am within “anyone” and I like eating well. Effort kinda sucks too, especially when I don’t want to be effortful1. I’m glad someone is making the world a better place by solving this problem.

Now, I really do think there’s a real problem that Uber Eats is providing value to. A single mother working full-time, raising two children, and just had a tough day? I’m so glad she has the choice to have an alternative to cooking. To be clear, I’m also not advocating for some kind of weird stoic stance to suffering – I greatly enjoy calling up a pizza late at night just because I can – this is a wonderful privilege to have and I’m genuinely excited for the next time it happens.

That said, while I’m sure there are many great use cases for this, I’m far less sure if there are "$12B-In-2023-Revenue" worth of use cases. To add on, I’m also sure that the Uber Eats management team doesn’t look at their revenue and say: “Team. We’ve really nailed the problem here. No need to grow our revenue next year. Let’s consider if we’ve maybe overshot the scope of our mission and appropriately downsize.”

One might argue, that the market function is the basis for us having the luxury we have today. Food delivery available to all with a smartphone is a perfect example of a free market’s might. Haven’t you heard how Boris Yeltsin visited an American supermarket and was so stunned by the choices available that it contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union? To complain about firms providing goods and services to seek profit is to be deeply ignorant of the privileges we live in. Our modern world is clearly much better today – surely we wouldn’t want to live in the scarcity economics of other societies? Can you imagine the dysfunction of a Soviet-style, state-built, food delivery app?

Yet, is the market function our only way to solve a problem? Granted, the market is extraordinarily good at allocating resources to create an abundance of innovation, but for all problems?

Does the abundance of choice actually lead to good decision-making? Is the drive for greater profitability aligned with user well-being? There are plenty in “anyone” who currently has trouble eating well but is unprofitable to serve, what happens when mission conflicts with profit? Doesn’t this create even more problems? The incentive alignment of modern economics puts our ability to solve this problem well into question.

Meanwhile, let’s examine the mission statement closer:

make eating well effortless at any time, for anyone.

Is “effortlessly eating well” even a good problem to solve?

Many children growing up in China would have memorized poems. A popular one for my generation went like this:

锄禾日当午，
汗滴禾下土。
谁知盘中餐，
粒粒皆辛苦

It came from the Tang period (~600-900AD) and described a poet’s sympathy for the work of a farmer, that each grain of rice in a bowl came from hard, effortful work. Unlike North America, China still has famine and scarcity in its recent collective memory. Food security remains a salient subject for both the personal and political realms. A poem like this is a part of an overall education for learning moderation and appreciation.

Here, a deep sense of effort is being portrayed, so it is the role of our technology to eliminate that effort. We can then leisurely enjoy the fruits of our intelligence.

One green revolution later, productivity skyrockets, and the effort in each grain is more questionable than ever.

What results is an abundance of unprecedented scale and confusing consequences: obesity can be a greater threat than hunger2, the amount of food that is wasted every year is difficult to fathom3, and children increasingly believe food comes from the supermarket.4

Making “eating well effortless” appears to accelerate the disconnect between ourselves as humans and the processes that constitute us.

I don’t need to know what an “Aioli” is or how long it takes to make a “Hollandaise Sauce”. I just need to know they are delicious and to order them to my door with just a couple of taps on my phone. Honestly, if I could do without the effort of the taps, that’d be even better.

For both the individual and the collective, this has profound implications.

As an individual, I’m ever more disconnected and ignorant of the world which leads to a “me”. I’m less sensitive to basic knowings like how caramelizing onions can concentrate their sweetness or how to listen to whether a steak is browning properly. I also atrophy in my ability to taste the difference between a meal ordered versus a meal self-made. In an important sense, the effortlessness de-educates me by removing me from my world, thus de-powering me in my ability to adapt and solution in complex environments: How should food compost be handled – just toss it in the garbage. Why does the delivery driver seem sad today – other people’s feelings are not my problem.5

For the collective, when the population no longer understands where our food, air, and energy come from, issues like climate change are naturally an “out there” phenomenon. The population that loses touch with their own experience will naturally lose touch with the experiences of others, fueling the basis for polarization. Less conceptually, consider the unimaginable loss of human narrative when we no longer understand the meaning of: “This was how my mother made the dish, she learned it from her mother.” We would be breaking a chain that goes back for tens of thousands of years and we don’t have the first idea of what this will do to our social fabric.

As we embed ourselves in more and more effortless ways to get food, entertainment, and news, we forget what Effort is for in the first place.

“Effort” isn’t just a vestigial drudgery of our animal past, awaiting elimination from our higher intelligence. Effort is the metabolic energy we expend that allows us to make contact with our world. To lose that contact, or interface, is also to lose our ability to sense our environment and, by extension, our own mind. Not to mention, it’s not quite that we lose the interface as it is replaced – to tap buttons rather than to cook. Imagine if human intimacy was replaced by taps instead6, how would we learn healthy human interactions?

Conveniently, we have evolved to thrive with effort (within reason) – sitting in a chair all day is to await atrophy and develop physical ailments. However, if our problem-solving tendencies start to eat away at aspects of our worlds in such a rush, we may solution away our very right to relate effortfully with the world.

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What is left when problems are left unsolved?

A few days ago, I was pouring some tea.

As I poured, I ended up spilling some onto the table.

My immediate thought was, this is kinda poorly designed no?

The amount of tea that could flow out is too large for the little spout. If I’m not careful, tea can pour over the sides of the spout, clinging onto the outside of the vessel, and then spill onto the table.

Surely, a better design would have accounted for this. It’s a problem that could be solved, and in fact, should have been solved.

I have enough problems already – why does pouring tea have to be a problem too?

As I took pause, I wondered whether the spilled tea was in fact a relevant problem. Sure, there’s a “problem” here that I can solve by changing for a cup that accounts for this. However, just because I identified a problem doesn’t mean it’s a good one to solve.

To put it another way, the meaning of the spill is more than simply annoyance. Each spill was directly downstream of my pouring being hasty and distracted. Had I been present with my tea, instead of the inner sense of haste that was busily being productive, I most certainly would not have spilled.

Each spill then becomes a reminder of mindfulness. The “problem” is instead transmuted to a valued feature.

Amusingly, I would now have a problem if someone replaced my “annoying” teacup. I wouldn’t want to lose the teaching the teacup is giving me.

So long as entropy exists and so long as humans desire things, there will be problems to solve. Any relentless race to solve all problems is surely a foolhardy endeavor. If this is so, we might as well slow down and harvest the fruits our current problems are already providing us.

A poem to end off.

For Want of a Nail:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost;

For want of a shoe the horse was lost;

For want of a horse the battle was lost;

For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost;—

All for the want of a horse-shoe nail.

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One of my favorite archetypes/personas is the one of the “nerd”, specifically the one that goes:

Um Actually … ☝🤓

There’s something precious about the people who feel compelled to correct the wrongs they see in the world. There’s a sacred drive to preserve the Truth and cohere our social fabric. Otherwise, would we not descend into uncivilized chaos?

There is even a Cunningham’s Law that follows from this archetype, as manifested in society, which goes: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

I, myself, can be quite the representation of this archetype.

Recently, upon overhearing someone saying something like “… and David is very excited to do this.”

I quickly called out, from another room no less: “I’m excited. I’m not very excited.”

This is very important! We can’t just embellish everything without calibration. If we anchor too much on “very excited” as a fair representation of “excited”, then will we represent “very excited” with “very very excited”?! That’s a slippery slope to meaninglessness! Words have meanings! We must have shared and calibrated benchmarks or we will lose our very means to communicate.1

This can be especially agitating when the subject described is close to one’s sense of identity. It’s not just someone random who’s feeling very excited, it’s me – and I most certainly am not very excited 😤. After all, only I know my interior, so surely I am the authority on what is the “correct” interpretation of my experience.

After all, when others “misunderstand” who we understand ourselves to be, it can feel quite hurtful.

If I believe myself to be a loving friend, my friend says to me “You don’t care about me at all” can be a devastating experience – the erasure of all the effort and thought put into the relationship.

The instinct, stemming from a literal survival sense to protect one’s existence (of identity/ego), often seeks to correct it: “That’s not true! Here is all the evidence that shows why that is not so.” – and on the argument would go, as we try our best to settle on “Truth”.

This is consequential beyond the personal. It’s reflected in the political as well. Imagine a logger who proclaims to an environmentalist that they don’t care about families and children because they are ruining jobs. The environmentalist would probably feel a flash of searing indignation – they are precisely fighting for the future so that there can even be a livable planet for families and children in the first place: “How dare they say this? They clearly don’t know the first thing about me!”

These dynamics are plenty and omni-directional: parent-child, employee-employer, politician-constituent, nation-nation, the polarizing political topic du jour, etc, etc.

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Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. – Victor Frankl

We can certainly say that the desired state is one of curiosity. Some

thing like: “What you say surprises me. Why do you think I don’t care about [this thing that I believe I care about]?”

But how could I not be inflamed when someone misunderstands something so central and critical?

Yet, what does it mean to be misunderstood anyway?

To be misunderstood is to assume there exists a correct interpretation from which to mistake against. Understandably, as a unique consciousness, no one has access to our interiority quite like ourselves. We know and experience the intricacies of our interiority all our lives – naturally, we have advanced insight into its workings.

However, does the familiarity make it True?

To have authority on something is quite different than to claim Truth. It may be that others may have authority on the subject as well. This is not only so for “objective” domains like “How much is climate change man-made”, it’s also the case for our subjective experiences. Consider a wise teacher who may know a student’s experience better than they do, thereby able to act as a guide in learning or a wife who knows a husband’s idiosyncrasies better than he does.

In fact, it’s hard to say whether we can even be a good “authority” with respect to our own experience. I, for one, am often confused about many things. I don’t really know why I might feel less loved or more loved one day. It’d be rather tricky to discern the causality between whether my story about why I’m unloved is the reason I feel unloved or that my feeling unloved generated my story about why I’m unloved.

From my perspective, Intimacy is the quality by which anyone gains “authority” on a subject. By Intimacy here, I mean something like “making contact deeply” – thus gaining access to some subject’s qualitative nature. This could be intimacy with respect to a subject like Calculus, increasingly "grokking" the nature of change and how to describe it mathematically. It could also be with something ineffable like “Nirvana” or “Love”. Of course, this also applies to intimacy with respect to another person (or any organism for that matter), deeply relating to their life and experience.

Any sufficiently profound phenomenon in the universe, which certainly includes human experiences, should be multi-faceted enough that we can only ever have a partial grasp, or “map”, of the "territory".

This suggests that even with the greatest degree of “authority”/intimacy, one is still giving a perspective about some subject; which may or may not be relevant, nuanced, or profound.

Consider an example.

Let’s say I have a daughter. I love her and work hard to give her a fulfilling life. Naturally, I hope my daughter can appreciate this and that she also loves me.

One day, she says to me: “I hate you Dad! You ruin everything!”

What should I do upon hearing this?

Should I update my sense that perhaps I’m not as good of a father as I had thought? After all, regardless of my efforts, if the end result is her feeling this way, then clearly, I haven’t been effective. In fact, like how I might feel about my own parents as uncaring, I’m probably falling into the same pitfalls. She is probably correct.

Or, should I say that she’s wrong? I am her father and she doesn’t understand how much I do for her and the family – she’ll understand when she’s older. In fact, to demonstrate to myself I’m a good father, I know saying she misunderstands won’t help, so I won’t even argue with her. After all, I am the authority on my own experience and it’s understandable for her to misunderstand.

Rather than who owns the truth (or the authority to determine it), both perspectives can stand on their respective grounds, available for further investigation and intimacy.

I may be able to consider, at the union of both paths, that I still recognize what I do for the family and that surely for a subject as complex as fatherhood, I also only have a partial grasp on it. Here, my daughter is offering me an additional perspective, one that might help me understand fatherhood better. Sure, the perspective is rather emotionally charged and feels hurtful to receive, but wow, she sure feels strongly about it – what is this “everything” referring to; I certainly didn’t know I was ruining it. If I sufficiently felt why she feels I have so missed what she cares about, she may even be interested in how I felt about what she said.

In this interpretation, what matters is the draw towards further intimacy (as facilitated by a desire to understand). whether I am a “good” father is less relevant than my interest in what my daughter is perceiving. Who is misunderstanding whom and thus proves who has the “true” perspective is also less relevant than simply the information latent in her perception.

In this interpretation, there’s no such thing as a mis-understanding. There are only different understandings, with varying degrees of intimacy, which all aggregate together to form the wholeness of the subject in question.

I’m the father who works hard for his family and the father who in this moment his daughter experiences “hate” for him.

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In the moment when the person said “David is very excited to …”, my correction to “excited” may have prevented a misunderstanding, but in doing so, I simultaneously closed off the re-understanding that I could be “very excited” instead.

To protect my notion of “truth”, I’ve tossed aside “possibility”.

Surely, I’m large enough that the seed of “very excited” was waiting to sprout, and perhaps what I needed was just a “misunderstanding”.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

As I contemplated why it was that people around me didn't like it when I was proselytizing the wonders of "Functions", here's a conclusion I came to:

These are not my people. They don't understand what I care about, and getting them to understand is impractical. I need to find my people.

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I first felt it when I came into contact with the Effective Altruism movement/community – the magic of community. 

Every conversation opens more enticing threads, carrying on organically for hours at a time, full of joy and vitality. I found people I looked forward to seeing every day, building things together in a way that isn't just a veiled attempt for success or money. People were genuine, kind, and intelligent. They cared about the world and about how to help it. Most importantly, they cared about what I cared about! Talking about "Functions" was never wrong here. On the contrary, it was welcomed and fostered. It was the most enjoyable and thriving learning environment I've found up until that point in my life.

I finally found my people, I thought to myself.

The Effective Altruism movement is a remarkable phenomenon – one of the modern movements centered around doing good that has reached a significant scale. By doing good here, it means ambitiously and robustly doing good. Robustly here broadly can be translated as analytical, and one of the most prominent ideas around the time in the community was "Expected Value". This was the idea that we can estimate outcomes by taking the value of the outcome and multiplying it by the probability of the outcome (e.g. Suppose I can take an action that has a 50% chance of gaining $10, my action would have an Expected Value (EV) of $5). 

How did I know this "Expected Value" idea was a cool new thing? Well, unlike my "functions" stage at home, everyone had EV on their lips and in their blog posts. It wasn't just me this time. Swarms of intelligent and good-hearted people were subscribed to the gospel!

The community was a powerful learning context. Every meet-up, every conference, was not only a place for social communion, they served as the basis for learning the praxis of central ideas within the philosophy. Not only did we discuss economic theory, but we also applied it to everything we can think of, together. 

Don't waste your time talking about the weather, discuss the EV of learning to give vs. direct work! 

Want to go on a walk and just talk about if what Elon is doing is positive or negative EV? Sure!

Everyone had hammers and everything was nails. It was wondrous fun and inspiring learning. It was basically nerd heaven. 

Turns out, a great way to drill in useful ideas like Expected Value is to just form a community where everyone is talking about it passionately all the time. The idea(s) becomes the celebrity, and Probability Theory becomes the lore on which one pours attention. Schools can only wish they could achieve the same fervor from the EAs devouring math and philosophy and whatever else that was relevant to the crusade of doing good better. Truly, a marvel of pedagogy has been achieved.1

Learning this way can be immensely enjoyable, rewarding, and connecting. It can foster a context in which one naturally wants to pay attention to what others are learning. We organically want to support each other by directing attention to what is being learned, thus benefiting from diverse perspectives. This is enabled by both the degree we trust each other to share the same learning objectives as well as the social sense of belonging gained.2

The conviviality of a learning context like this one can be nothing less than magnetic, forming a culture in which people participate with passion (or zealotry). The learning objects sometimes even become revered, anchoring the culture, and forming its identity and reputation.

However, while friendships were made and learning was done, like my "functions" stage that annoyed those around me, now we have an entire (increasingly influential) community of people yelling "ExPeCTed VAluEs!!".3

😬

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Like humans, whose learning evolves, communities do too. 

We could notice and study the evolution of a community's learning by studying how its Overton Window shifts over time. 

Since communities are comprised of humans, it means that two layers of learning co-evolve together. One of the individuals within and one for the community as an aggregate whole – each influencing the direction and magnitude of the other.

Some people, whose learning starts to diverge from the Overton Window vector, would naturally drift away from the community.

Others, whose learning starts to converge with the Overton Window, would then be attracted closer.

As everyone conducts the search for "my people", relationships (and institutions) are forged and broken along this tectonic movement.

In the Effective Altruism case, I no longer perceive Expected Values as a primary learning focus of the community – it has pretty much "already been learned". It's a term that you can throw around and expect people to understand, but it's no longer on everyone's lips and blogs. The community has grown (along with its relatively young population) and now has other things at the forefront of its learning.

In my case, I somehow discovered, partially thanks to the friends I made in the community, that the answer "Effective Altruism" is not a suitable response to the question of "Who are my people?". If anything, the question itself seems ... off. 

The answer to that question, for me, is less so a community per se, but more so the availability of a particular experience. In other words, "my people" is not actually quite apt, because it's not defined as "There exists some Alex or Bob, whom when I discover them, we would mutually recognize permanently that we have found "my-people-ness". 

Instead, the question could perhaps be rephrased as: 

"What kind of relational experience do I want to live and learn in?"

The joy and vitality I described in the Effective Altruism example above is an illustration of this experience in which I want to live and learn. It's a palpable, life-aligned kind of experience.

Yet, my experience shows me that these experiences are fragile and most of all – Ephemeral. They come and go, with a confounding degree of mystery. Yet, when attention is properly paid, these (often micro) moments glimmer everywhere, like virtual particles teasing at possibilities of permanence.

How to cultivate a learning context where such experiences can be stably abundant for all constituents is then a worthwhile undertaking for me. In other words, the focus changes from "who are my people" to fostering a context where others can and would want to also share in the experiences we all find Life in.

Which ... circles it back to Community again. 😅

Whether "Community" is even an appropriate term at this point is a bit beyond me, but three components seem important to this particular reconstruction of the community: 

• The first is that this community technically already exists (in the moments when others also share these experiences), but also technically doesn't exist (insofar as they are ephemeral and hard to coordinate around). To this end, the undertaking represents a "search-and-create" function for life-aligned co-learning experiences. The search-and-create function would then itself be a sub-function of the learning function that is central to the community's constitution. This feels best illustrated by the image of a mycelium, underground and fruiting based on where fitting contexts emerge.

• The second is that this community's “Overton Window” is necessarily quite abstract. It has to recursively allow for people's learning evolution, including when it gets contradictory/conflicting with the person themselves, other people, or the community overall. For example, if the community holds the value of something like "learning is the most important activity", but one person is in a period of learning something about "less learning and more doing", it has to somehow prevent disintegration in this process. The idea of "What is Learning?" would need to take on higher dimensionality, similar to how I described Relationships in Part 2. To this end, this community, at least at the beginning, would likely look quite strange from the outside, because it is a constant ball of contradictions, on the edge of disorientation and insight.

• The third is that this community, despite its fungi-like and contradictory properties, manages viable means of interface with the broader world. This includes the practical, like sustainable economic flows. This would also be ecological, like the inflow and outflow of people. If the "community" in fact is constituted around a particular experience of living and learning, anyone may decide for any duration that they don't want to focus on this experience. Lastly, this central learning orientation also needs to extend beyond its constituents to other communities and individuals. For example, if the community is going through a period of learning about ideas around wholeness and non-reductive ways of thinking, the friction between the described-above “EA community” focused on compressing evaluations to expected values has to somehow be transmuted to something other than conflict or avoidance.

Abstract as it may sound, I think there are historical analogs that help flesh out the picture. The most distinct of which is simply Science (more so early days rather than the present day), which I think captures all three points exceptionally well. A concrete expression of this might be the Invisible College.

A community shaped like this seems very much like a place I would want to live and learn in.

Naturally, while this "When One Is Holding A Hammer" series contains some of my observations on how people and groups learn, it would also, of course, be a reflection of the "what" and the "how" of my own learning. 

Which is to say that, apparently, I am holding a hammer that is about how we could hold hammers more wisely and compassionately together.

In the very sense of what I'm trying to describe by this "community" or learning context or ecosystem, where sharing the marvels of what we are learning is an experience of Joy and Vitality:

The process of writing this post is itself a search-and-create function for that very aliveness.

The act of sharing these posts then is a motion that seeks to summon that "community" into moments of existence between us.

Through the act of sharing and feedback, it gives me invaluable information that facilitates my learning to foster this experience more in the future.

“You must give birth to your images.

They are the future waiting to be born.

Fear not the strangeness you feel.

The future must enter you long before it happens.”  

– Rainer Maria Rilke

When I first learned about attachment theory, it was because I had a nail in need of a hammer. I was fresh out of a relationship, and I was confused as to why it didn’t work out. A nagging suspicion was forming that all of my relationships were sharing some disturbingly similar pattern.

A respected instructor described Attachment Theory in a workshop as something they were thinking about and immediately I knew I had found my hammer.

Of course. It was so obvious. I was avoidant in relationships and it explained everything!

Naturally, there’s nothing quite like the motivation to better understand the theory that feels like it will “explain everything”. I poured over the texts and I latched onto the experts.

“Explain to me how! Explain to me why!” I inquired.

And explained they did. Pieces slotted together. More and more behaviors started to make sense. Not just mine, but other people’s. My parents did such and such because they had these attachment patterns. My friends had challenges in their relationships because they had those attachment patterns.

I can see the matrix.

Relationship – Solved.

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Now, for better or for worse, I also sometimes teach. By the grace of the universe, every so often, a group of people will sit down for a while and listen to what I have to say.

So, of course, I need to tell them this incredible solution to relationships. I would craft workshops to enlighten people on the whys and hows of their relationships. Partially thanks to some good training in building good classes, I would even have people come up to me after sessions and tell me how much they are seeing their relationships now in a new light. Hearing comments like “Wow, I feel like you finally helped me make sense of my relationship of many years” is quite an encouragement to keep working. Clearly, I’m doing sacred work.

Inconveniently though, there comes a time when Attachment Theory (or any model for that matter) reaches its limits. Post-surprise, not everything in human relational dynamics can be boiled down to a two by two of {avoidant, non-avoidant, anxious, non-anxious}. More and more models were discovered and explored in the intersubjective realm (communication, relational) and subjective realm (contemplative, developmental) which expands the scope beyond what one model can handle. In the case of attachment theory, I found that different ways of defining and pursuing “Secure Attachment”, are no longer sufficient or satisfying.

Bizarrely, I found that the more I learned beyond the model, the more I lost my ability to teach Attachment Theory. I didn’t lose what I know, if anything I know even more now, yet my teaching is worse. How could this be?

When holding a hammer, especially if one can be sufficiently articulate or charismatic, one not only convinces oneself that everything is a nail, they could also convince everyone around them that the hammer is the solution to everything. Given that sometimes these tools do address important problems – attachment theory is a powerful model for relationship development for children and adults – the enthusiasm from an advocate can dazzle an audience. Thus, when in a position to teach, this can have an unexpectedly large effect since, usually, we are teaching those less informed than us.1

In my experience, there are three buckets of “teachers” I mostly see, in a 90/9/1 type of distribution.

• The first 90% is, unfortunately, what we are probably most familiar with. These are the teachers who themselves are uninterested in their own content, drilled by years upon years of standard school constraints that, barring the few heroic souls, languish in regurgitating what has been written in lesson plans formed years ago. Let’s label this group “Soul-Drained Teachers”.2

• The second 9% would be the those who have genuine passion for the subject they are talking about. These are usually the few heroic souls in calcified institutions as well as the many teaching figures found often in niche circles or highly effective institutions.3 This can be startups, a local comic book store, or exceptional think tanks4. Let’s label this group “Passionate Enthusiasts”

• Lastly, the rare 1% are the ones who have moved beyond passionate enthusiasm and matured into having a deep reverence for the crafts they hone. These are the masters of their respective crafts not only in terms of subject matter knowledge, but also in how to teach the subject matter. This group is able to simultaneously keep in their mind the interactions between: the nature of the content, the student’s mind, and their own mind – an exceptional feat. One can recognize this type by the experience of being taught. We walk away feeling like we have been taken for a personalized ride through a beautiful world, awed but never quite overwhelmed. Let’s label this group “Tempered Masters”.

In some way, we could see the “Passionate Enthusiasts” as the starting point of any would-be teacher feeling the spark to share and instill in others the wonder they experienced. They could either become “Soul-Drained Teachers” or “Tempered Masters” over time.

By the grind of bureaucracy and many other factors, one can become disillusioned that despite eroding passion, one is stuck in the position of teaching – a most unfortunate lose-lose outcome that constitutes the current norm.

However, by some factors, a minority of these people go on to form mastery instead, enthusiasm tempered to form the kind of quality that becomes the greatest teachers, masters, coaches, mentors – an elusive grail in all forms of education.

What could be these factors though? And why is the distribution so lopsided that so few becomes the kind of teachers we wish for?

In my own experience of finding Attachment Theory harder to teach as I learned beyond it, I found that, when faced with the option to offer multiple tools to a student, I was at a loss for which is the right tool to offer.

It’s cognitively much easier when I have one tool for everyone. My job is just to teach that tool well by applying it to as many situations as possible to help students internalize the idea. However, when a student presents a problem with multiple feasible solutions, how am I suppose to know which is the right solution for a particular student with a particular problem.5

In this case, in order to keep teaching well, I am deeply pressured to reconstruct and evolve my model of “Relationship”. With Attachment Theory, I only had a model of Relationship seen through the eyes of Attachment Theory or “Relationship Qua Attachment Theory”. However, that model of Relationships is naturally a compressed version due to the limits of the model I’m using to understand it. By gaining “Relationship Qua Non-Violent Communication”, “Relationship Qua Buddhist Suffering”, “Relationship Qua Poly-Vagal Theory”, and (let’s say controversially) “Relationship Qua Astrology”, Relationship as an object gains profound dimensionality. Now the model is far more complex, rich, informative, and powerful. Yet, not only would I need to attempt to integrate these sometimes contradictory models for myself, I would also have to discern the appropriate compressions (i.e. slices from the more complex idea of Relationship) for a student.

This pressure forges mastery.

There are times when pursuing this can be challenging. I have had cases where I do my absolute best conveying what I thought was the coolest, best possible slice for what a student’s asking for, only for it to fall completely flat. It would be unreasonable (and often counter productive) to then complain to the student why they should have gotten my super awesome analogy. As teachers, we can lack the contexts to reflect on these experiences and long durations of these experiences can be quite deflating.

While due to the nature of the roles between Teacher and Student makes it such that there are times when the Teacher ought not to reveal information for pedagogical reasons, we are Humans, not just roles. Since we are always learning, all the time, we don’t have to force any given Teacher-Student pair to break limits to pedagogy to support our learning or teaching. In a culture where peer-to-peer mutual learning support can be assumed, I can support a different teacher-student pair while another person would support mine.

To the extent that I have received positive feedback from when I have taught and to the extent that I have retained my passion and soul in teaching, it’s thanks to the various contexts that created this atmosphere. I’m blessed to be in a few contexts where mutual interest in each other’s learning can be assumed and thus sharing becomes an ecstatic practice that enhances all participants in their capacity to learn and to teach.

As a result, it has brought me a greater degree of salience to the need for compassion when we are sharing what’s important to us. As we reveal a part of the world that marvel us, it can be disheartening to have it be dismissed or even immediately debated over. Allowing a space for the appreciation of the fact that there is something to marvel at all, and that we are beings capable of marvel, seems to me always, a worthy thing to create.

I believe if we treat those who teaches (which is really anyone who shares anything) in the same spirit, we’d find a lot more of these Tempered Masters in our world.

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P.S.

As a not-so-tangential extension, we can replace “Teacher” with “Parent” here and access yet another bundle of complexity.

There is the saying that “no one knows how to parent … until they start parenting”. I think there’s a lot of truth to this. What it implies can also be awkward. As a child, forming our consciousness for the first time in this universe, we can’t be expected to model our parent’s learning – we are busy with other things like Breathing and Speech.

I think it shouldn’t be controversial to claim that “Parents” are in the category of people who “teaches” things. Yet, we probably give the least amount of learning support to them as a category.

When we also shift from “The Parent” to “My Parent”, the difficulty of staying connected with this radically jumps up. The same could be said for anyone playing the “Role of Parent” as well. Parental figures can sometimes have it just as hard.

Many of us could probably imagine the friction that lies in a parent learning to finally take time for themselves after many years of work grind and a youth finally starting to learn the value of striving for greatness. Similar pedagogical limits seems binding in this pair. Ancestrally, at least, larger families can help, but also often enough exacerbates through the act of taking sides. I hope to expand on this in the next part.

Lastly, a song.