Ben Casnocha: The Blog

What Did You Learn at the Meta-Level?

Qualifying questions with "at the meta-level" means that the answer should be quite general in its implications.

You might ask me after I returned from Switzerland the other week, "What did you learn at the meta-level?"

A wrong answer is: "Zurich is a pretty city."

A possible answer is: "National pride is unaffected by the health of the economy." Or: "56 percent of the value of a trip is in the memories, not the actual travel."

Asking people what they learned from an experience is always illuminating. It tests how reflective they are (do they even ask themselves this question?), whether they are able to abstract general lessons from a specific experience (that is, answer at the meta-level), and whether they can separate out and discount the lessons rooted in unique circumstances (the lessons not generalizable).

(Hat tip Tyler Cowen, in an email, for this insight and the travel example above.)

Clinging to the Wreckage

Four months ago I wrote a post titled In Praise of Feeling Utterly Confused. I said confusion, self-doubt, feeling like you're treading just above water, deep uncertainties about things others seem so certain about: this is part of life, or at least part my life.

Andrew Sullivan has a thoughtful meditation on this topic on his blog. He reflects upon his internal angst and confusion by noting the failure of some of his most cherished institutions: the Catholic church, conservatism, and America.

After describing how those institutions have failed him, he ends:

Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it's a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.

Where to go? What to do? You read me flounder every day; and you can find many less conflicted bloggers to read. Maybe I should take a break and live a less examined life for a while. Or maybe I should do what I am still doing: trying to make sense of where I belong, stay praying in a church that has sealed itself off from modernity, cling to a conservatism that begins to feel like a form of solipsism, hang on in the hope that America can reform itself and repair the world a little. I think, in fact, that this is obviously the right and only serious choice. Life is always a temporary and losing battle, an engagement with the deadliness of doing. It just feels deadlier than usual in these past few years of brutally unsentimental education.

Or maybe I should laugh more.

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

I think there's some truth to the idea that "everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it."

As Martin Buber said, "The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable."

The Deadly Earnest Hunt for Identity

Leah Hager Cohen is a talented writer who I first discovered via her reviews in the New York Times Book Review. Her semi-frequent dispatches on her blog, Love as a Found Object, often cause me to pause and think. In her latest post she relays a story from her adolescence to make a point about the hunt for identity and authenticity, a familiar process for anyone "poised between childhood and adulthood." The two best paragraphs below:

What do we know of ourselves then, at the age when we cannot tear ourselves from the mirror, not out of vanity but out of the urgent search to identify, to see, oneself? Up until this time we have been who we are, c'est ça: matter of fact. And someday we will settle again, if less innocently, less righteously, into being squarely ourselves, no more and no less. But there is a time in the middle when we are ciphers to our own minds, when the robust vines of self-consciousness threaten to overwhelm the slighter tendrils of self.

This is when we are prone to spend hour upon hour trying on accents, attitudes, gestures, hats. Colors and moods. Props. We might practice holding wineglasses by the stem; beer bottles by the neck; cigarettes betwixt our fingers; a book in one hand, a hank of our own hair in the other. We try on scowls and sneers, we purse and pout, we analyze our smiles for traces of the beatific. We experiment with unwashed hair, unshaven legs, unmended rips, ungrammatical and ungracious pronouncements. We experiment with posture, with kindness, with the limits of humor and of despair. We do none of it to deceive; rather, we are researching in deadly earnest. We are taking astounded stock of our enormous range. And we are on the lookout all the while for what rings true, for the moments of recognition, for the rare and precious moments we sense home.

Whether or not you enjoy the company of reflective teens and young adults depends a lot on how stimulating you find this stage of life and the broad experimentation that Cohen points out. To retain sanity as a professor, for example, you must find thrill in engaging a constituency (students) doing all the above and more, if you're lucky, as they're also indulging intellectual enthusiasms: Nietzsche! Locke! Burke! Every day is a new hero, which is great except that appreciative hero-worship demands more than staccato attention.

Myself, when not engaged in my own exploring and confused wonderings along these lines, I tend to most enjoy people a few notches beyond this stage (age and stage are not always connected) where the sand beneath your feet is firmer not because you've answered all these questions or resolved all these self-doubts, but because the earnest, anxious, important, falsely urgent, and somewhat trite quest to "find yourself" and "figure out what I'm going to do with my life" has been replaced by a longer range view, one familiar with the real opportunities to reinvent yourself and your career over a lifetime, the surprising benefits of shade over light in some situations (ie, the joys of not knowing certain parts of you, the future, the world, etc), an appreciation for the permanence and fluidity of identity, and, bottom line, the acceptableness of "I don't know" to any number of meaty philosophical or practical questions.

Sub-Conscious Synthesis of Experiences

High functioning people tend to be very good at pattern recognition: they accumulate lots of experiences (pieces of pattern) and then synthesize them (whole pattern) into something meaningful or actionable.

Some people are particularly good at seeing patterns in lines of code. Others are good at seeing patterns in human behavior, or in architecture, or in the way tennis balls fly over the net.

Accumulating lots of random experiences isn't enough. The experiences need to be concentrated / focused. An early-stage VC needs to have seen a lot of early stage tech companies, for example, not just companies in general. Second, once you have a bag full of concentrated experiences, you still need to make sense of them and spot patterns. Probably the most important skill in this respect is being able to identify experiences that are generalizable versus experiences are that are to be discounted as anomalous.

Here's the complicating factor: at an elite level experience-synthesis happens sub-consciously. A pro tennis player has hit the ball so many times that he doesn't actively think about moving his arm and smacking the ball with racket. A premier venture capitalist has seen so many companies that he can match in his head 10 elements of New Co X to 10 analogous elements in 10 other companies -- but he won't always be able to explain this process in words. A yay or nay response on an entrepreneur pitch gets explained as a "gut feeling."

Perhaps the most famous example of sub-conscious synthesis is when radiologists look at x-rays and try to figure out whether a patient has cancer. Apparently, the best way to be able to reliably predict cancerous x-rays is to look at thousands of x-rays marked cancer or no-cancer. Over time, you develop an intuitive sense of what's cancerous. There are no rules or formulas. You can't always explain your reasoning. You just know.

Sub-conscious synthesis creates problems when trying to understand how the elites did something. We listen anxiously to venture capitalists explaining how they knew Yahoo and Google were going to be winners or to Lance Armstrong explaining how he won a race, but their comments are almost always banal and not very useful. Their level of synthesis (true experts) is so deep they cannot helpfully explain what's going on in their head to others.

It's why some of the best advice-givers tend themselves not to be in the top 1% of whatever it is they offer advice on.

It's why the post-game analysis by the chubby broadcaster who was only a mediocre player in his day is nine times out of ten more rewarding than the post-game interview with the star player of the game.

Quote of the Day: Wisdom Cannot Be Taught

"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world."

    - Marcel Proust

Have You Changed Your Mind Recently?

What have you changed your mind about? That was the question posed to dozens of scientists and intellectuals at the endlessly stimulating web site Edge.org. Paul Kedrosky took a stab at the question, too.

I love the question because it implicitly rejects inertia-powered living: believing something because you have always believed it, doing something because you have always done it, living today like you lived yesterday without stopping to ask why.

Questioning entrenched habits or beliefs is hard. It can result in uncertainty or self-doubt. But ultimately I think makes you a more rigorous and respectable thinker. Contra those who glorify "consistency" and pounce on any shift in opinion as "flip-flopping" or hypocritical, I pay attention to those who have clear uncertainties, those who have changed their political party affiliation in their lifetime, those who have a long list of sentences which begin: "In light of new evidence or new reflections I now believe...."

Since it's Inauguration Day and politics is on my mind, I believe inertia was the reason many smart conservatives (and I have many smart conservative friends) voted for McCain / Palin on November 4th. It was easier to hold onto old beliefs -- around McCain's maverick-ness, around the Republican Party's so-called commitment to limited government -- than confront new facts as they came in. Namely, McCain's pandering and politics-as-usual, his party's big-government ideas, the recklessness of Sarah Palin both as a person and in what his picking her says about him. No, close your eyes and chant in unison, "Personal responsibility! [What does that even mean?] Limited government! Fierce independent thinker! Democracy!" I don't mean to impugn the critical thinking skills of the tens of millions who voted for that ticket - many of them had rational, good reasons for their vote. But other conservative intellectuals who supported McCain / Palin showed a remarkable disinterest in reality as it was unfolding and instead clung to the facts of yesterday or abstract philosophical ideals no longer embodied by the candidate on the ground.

Hail the lifelong Republican who donated and volunteered for past Republican campaigns who voted for Obama. Hail the Obama supporter who voted for "progressive" policies and is now expressing anger at Obama's very-centrist appointments and statements to-date. Hail the person who's willing to base current beliefs off current facts, even at the cost of identity confusion.

Like so many of the ideas on this blog, I write about this aspirationally! I am as susceptible to inertia as the next guy. I get seduced by pursuing what's familiar without asking myself whether it's also right - sometimes it is sometimes it's not, but either way actively asking myself the question would go a long way to making better decisions.

Bottom Line: Have you changed your mind about something recently?

Quote of the Day

"The person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him." - Ayn Rand

Why Love is Intentionally Vague

The best two paragraphs I read today via Robin Hanson:

Our relations with each other are very important to us, and they vary in a great many important ways.  Why then do we use the word "love" so often to describe our relations, as in the famous three words "I love you."  Why not instead use a variety of more precise words that convey more detailed meaning?  Why not say "I wistfully-romantically-heart you" or "I hopefully-lustfully-want you" or "I wearily-unwillingly-stick-to you"? 

The answer comes, I think from realizing that if we described our relations in more detail, we would have to acknowledge finer changes in our relations.  Our current "I love you" approach lets us use the same descriptor at all stages in our relation, and at all points in our mood cycles.  We don't have to announce when our relation moves from hopeful lust to wild passion to tender comfort to favorite-old-shirt familiarity.  Such announcements could be quite awkward, especially if our perceptions are not exactly in sync.

Very true. Robin asks for other examples of vague words and what would go wrong if we used more precise concepts.

Easier to Deny or Rationalize Behavior Than Evolve Your Own Identity

"To take control of their lives, people tell themselves stories about the person they want to be." - Jonathan Franzen

Intelligent people have a remarkable ability to rationalize irrational past actions, to re-interpret history to fit their preferred narrative. I've noticed this happens most when the actions in question contradict a person's internal vision of who they want to be: when the action represents a contradiction to a long-standing identity conception, and this contradiction represents an unacceptable burden of guilt or confusion ("If I'm not being the person I always say I am, then who am I?"), so they deny or rationalize it to make to compatible.

The man who has long considered himself an ethical person will find a way to contort an unethical misstep into the realm of moral acceptability. The woman who has long considered herself emotionally mature will find a way to contort an act of emotional immaturity into that identity.

For lying to yourself about specific actions is easier than re-defining the bounds of your imagined identity so that it's newly inclusive of the contradictory actions. When I see once-ethical men devolve into moral grey, they still identify as upstanding even though their behavior (which they have denied or rationalized) has eclipsed the label.

Who's susceptible to doing this? Not folks on the extremes of the rationality spectrum. At one end, the most meta-rational are so damn grounded in reality that they will not allow themselves self-delusion and cannot bear an incongruity between the story they tell themselves about who they are and the story an objective outsider would tell based on their actions. For this rare breed their identity and actions are mostly consistent. On the other side of the scale, the truly stupid are not capable of performing the kind of mental jujitsu that facilitate a self-serving re-remembering of events.

It's the rest of us, who are smart but by no means have arrived at rationality nirvana, who I think are most proficient at lying to ourselves about our actions to shoehorn them into a preconceived identity. (Note the phrasing "lying to ourselves" - it's the internal conversation I'm referring to.)

"Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles," says Eliezer Yudkowky. We could add: Confront the reality of your actions, even if it means your identity will have to evolve to accommodate them.

Bottom Line: Very smart, rational people still do not often let the truth get in the way of their current and aspirational identity. It's much easier to rationalize or deny behavior at odds with your self-identification than to confront your own self-delusion.

Related Posts:

• How and Why We Create Life Stories
• Constructing the Preferred Narrative of Our Lives - 2.5 years ago I express more positivity toward self-deception than I do now.

To Be At Once Serious and Self-Mocking

Say you're an ambitious person. You need to at once take seriously your aspiration for greatness and impact while also humbly laughing at the odds that your time on this planet will be very insignificant indeed. The smallest of dots on the map of human history, in fact. The task of reconciling these two opposing ideas I find a central struggle of the ambitious go-getter: without seriousness and without big dreams you will not fulfill your potential, without the broader perspective your seriousness becomes unbearable and you alienate others.

I meet young entrepreneurs all the time struggling with this. I've met teenagers convinced that intensity, relentless goal setting, and workaholism will lead them to the promised land. They have bet me with a stone-cold face that they will be president of the United States or the next Bill Gates. Part of me says, you go brother! But at times they display this ambition so nakedly that they turn me (and others) off. Their seriousness is suffocating. As any entrepreneur knows, you can't do it alone -- you gotta enlist the support and loyalty of others -- so ignoring how you're perceived is stupid. Likability matters.

I also meet student journalists searching for this middle ground. (I did when I ran my high school newspaper.)

The challenge of being a student journalist is that you want to stay away from well-covered national or international issues and focus on your niche (campus life), and you want to do so with a certain respectable seriousness as you're trying to accumulate real journalistic experience. The problem is if you apply more than a modicum of seriousness to most campus issues the exercise goes from amusing to absurd pretty quickly. The trivial (how much is the party security budget? is vegetarian food served in the cafeteria?) gets transformed into matters of worldly importance. So you want to professionally tackle the reporting task at hand while also injecting your work with a healthy dose of awareness about the likely triviality of the entire enterprise. Which is why, in my view, the best student publications tend to be heavy on humor and satire and wit.

Bottom Line: Be serious about your brief time on the planet. Dream big. But also be self-mocking enough to dilute your earnestness to a level that makes you tolerable.

---

Additional Note on Journalism: Since we're on the topic. Cynicism is a cheap path to seriousness. I think this explains the negativity underlying most student journalism, a conviction that things at school are always getting worse not better and that exposing this decline somehow upholds a forsaken ideal as opposed to just feeding a throbbing self-obsession. Any student publication I've been a part of or observed thinks this way. Though maybe this tendency is built into journalism in general under the banner of keeping authorities accountable, not just student journalism...

Hat tip: Thanks Larissa MacFarquhar for inspiring the last sentence of the Bottom Line.

Trust and the Failed State

Business moves at the speed of trust. - Stephen Covey

Trust is one of the many things, it seems to me, that is best understood and appreciated by experiencing it in its failed state.

Ah, failure. Until you've failed as an entrepreneur, it's hard to appreciate the entrepreneurial process. Until you've hired a wrong person, it's hard to appreciate the importance of hiring the best. Until someone has been reckless with your heart or you with theirs, it's hard to appreciate the criticalness of fidelity and honesty in romance. And so on. Like most cliches, "You learn more from a failed outcome than a successful one" reveals a terrifying truth.

Until someone has broken your trust, it's hard to appreciate the essence of being trustworthy yourself to others.

When does trust break down? Sometimes trust is lost over time, a series of small divots adding up. But sometimes trust is lost in a flash: a single, meaningful lapse of judgment. What takes months and years to develop between people can be eroded in a matter of hours.

It's not just the single lapse of judgment -- say, the stressed CFO who unethically fudged the numbers the night before the earnings call, or the husband who had a one-night affair. The actions themselves cause some but not all of the damage.

What proves most damning in the end is the imagination of the injured: the retroactive ("Has employee Joe been fudging the numbers all along?") and future suspicion of his activities and candor. Once this door of suspicion creaks open, it's hard for it to close all the way and hard for trust to be established anew. (Though it's not impossible -- I have a couple relationships which have emerged stronger, in the end, after a rupture.)

I've let people down before. I've done things that have endangered the bond of trust I had with a person. What I've learned is that when I proactively and swiftly acknowledge that I fucked up, I can re-build the bond. When the other person finds out second-hand or if I shirk from responsibility for own actions, it's much harder to repair.

Bottom Line: See the silver lining in failure. When someone breaks your trust, in the short term there's pain and self-doubt about your own ability to size up character. In the long term there's an opportunity to learn from the failure, deepen your own capacity be trusted and become wiser still in choosing who to trust in the future.

Regret Aversion

The best decision making tool I know of, and the framework within which I try to make most of my decisions, is the cost-benefit analysis.

The cost-benefit approach breaks down when you don't have enough information to weigh all of the costs or benefits, or when the future costs or benefits are uncertain.

So my second framework is what I call "regret aversion." My interest in the notion of regret started when I turned 18 and asked a few dozen adult friends what they regret not doing when they were 18. Interestingly, the #1 regret was not traveling more when they were younger. The regret question elicited an interesting set of responses and I followed up this idea with my post on asking questions in the negative.

Essentially, I have come to believe that many older people are haunted by the question "I wonder what would have happened if..." And that active 40 or 50 somethings regret not trying more things when they were younger. The regret can be as profound as "I regret not going to college" or as simple as "I wonder what would have happened had I mustered the courage to call that CEO I really respected and asked for help."

While it's no good being consumed with regret over a past you have no control over, it's similarly no good to ignore the past and not try to learn from your decisions. Devoting an optimal amount of attention to the past is an elusive task indeed -- I'm not convinced that complete detachment from the past is the best way to live. Most of the people I respect are reflective enough to have thought about their past and honest enough to harbor some regrets.

So, I regularly deploy the "regret aversion" rule of thumb: When in doubt, say yes. This will not eliminate regret from my life, nor is it a hard and fast rule (surely there are times when "No" is the right answer). But by doing more things, even relatively random things, if it doesn't work out, at least I'll know I tried (no "what if?"), and sometimes it actually does work out.

Let us remember in closing:

We regret the things we don't do more than the things we do. - Mark Twain

In Praise of Feeling Utterly Confused

I'm in the (freezing) midwest this week to keynote a couple of events and see friends. During Q&A someone asked whether I feel confused about what's happening on the macro-economic and political front and how that affects how I plan for the future. Here's the essence of what I tried to say:

I distrust anyone who says he can predict the future or anyone who is overly certain about anything. I am uncertain about most things that are going on around me -- especially at a macro level, but also on a personal level, where almost daily some of my intuitions about what will happen get mugged by reality. I plan and think about the future a great deal, but no matter how much I plan, shit happens. As Mike Tyson once said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face." I think we lie to ourselves about how in control we are. Chaos rules. Randomness rules. Emotions grip us. I'd like to think I posses a kind of inner calm that helps me make rational decisions day-to-day. I know I'm stable and confident (sometimes too confident) and, most of the time, relentlessly optimistic and happy. But I'd be lying if I said this amounted to a high degree of certainty about where the world is headed or even what in God's name I'll be doing in five years. I suppose I see the more enlightened among us as having achieved a certain comfortableness with uncertainty / confusion.

I would add that if you don't regularly feel utterly confused, if you don't occasionally feel like you're treading just above water, if you don't ever feel misunderstood, then you probably aren't living in life -- you're just observing it.

The "living in life" concept comes from Joan Didion, whose quote to this effect I reproduce in the Introduction of my book. It's from her UC Riverside commencement address:

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is ncessarily part of the package, I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

Do People Change?

The self-improvement industry rests on the proposition that with concerted effort you can become a better version of yourself and enact real change in your life. The cynic responds, "Oh come on, people don't change! Go to your high school reunion -- nobody's changed."

Both views are right. In some ways, a person will never change. Assholes at age 12 are usually assholes at age 30. Personality and core behavioral traits are largely heritable.

But in other important respects, people can absolutely change. Steven Pinker has suggested that if genes can explain 50% of complex human behavior, there's another 50% attributable to a person's "unique environment." One's environment is always changing -- especially if you are young. Youth are more plastic, both biologically and in terms of their ever-evolving circumstances and adventures. Hence I never box in a person under age 30.

If I had to pick a side, I am on the side that people can and do change over a lifetime. This doesn't always mean, in the face of dissatisfaction, I want to wait for it to happen -- any entrepreneur will tell you, "Hire the right person on day 1, don't try to change a person to fit the job." True. But there are other times when investing in someone's life as they evolve, grow, mature, age, can be enormously fulfilling. For example, it's fascinating to see someone endure adverse conditions and as a result become more resilient, or sympathetic, or hardened, etc. There are also countless extraordinary examples of people who have turned their life around when it seemed they were stuck in the depths of misery (drug addiction, for example). This reason alone should force us all to be open to the possibility of someone changing in big or small ways.

We've heard a lot from Obama about America striving to become "a more perfect union." I also think that within each person lies a capacity to better himself. This struggle to remake ourselves, to adapt to changing conditions, to develop new interests, to soften our edges and strengthen our cores, is a beautiful and uniquely human thing.

Bottom Line: Believing "people don't change" simplifies the world but ultimately can sell short the experience of living even a basic life. The collision of one's natural impulses with the dynamic, chaotic, unpredictable world of events can produce, in a lifetime, meaningful emotional, physical, and intellectual change.

What Do You Do Day-to-Day?

Tyler Cowen once suggested that if you want to find out what someone really believes, ask him what he thinks everyone else believes.

A slight re-frame can elicit the information you're looking for.

Here's a re-frame I thought of: If you want to find out what someone really does for a living, ask him what he does "on a day-to-day basis."

Usually, when you ask someone, "What do you do?" you get a grand, idealized vision of what their job is supposed to be. Hence, I follow this question with, "Interesting. So what does that entail on a day-to-day basis?" This question reveals a more concrete and helpful description.

Breaking down time into micro-chunks is also helpful for evaluating happiness. It's hard to contemplate the present-tense question, "Are you happy?" in the abstract. Past and future tense also fail. Looking back in time, we rationalize. Looking forward in time, we make terrible predictions about what will make us happy. So, one of the most famous and effective studies of happiness involved participants who carried around pagers and, several times a day in the heat of a moment, took note of how they were feeling. The researcher then evaluated the aggregate of these momentary entries.

Bottom Line: The best inquires about one's work and life are rooted in day-to-day activities and feelings.