I’ve been lucky to work with a few remarkably talented, truely creative people. Most of them have two problems:

  1. Promoting their art.
  2. Not understanding how really good they are.

The reason for #2 is this. Essentially, creative people surround themselves with really wonderful examples of their art. The musician that listens to The Beatles, Beethoven, and Biggie Smalls all day. Or the cartoonist that picks up his dog-eared copy of Maus for the 400th time. And the painter that moons away at each gallery of the Met, wishing she could capture the light just like El Greco or Turner.

Part of it is that you only get see how very good the masters are. You never get to see Van Gogh struggle with, and then give up on shadows. (Well, you can, if you visit the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam).

Instead, you’ve got your twenty page short story, and you compare it to Hemingway, when what you should be comparing it to is Dan Brown. Seriously, that’s a funny article. Read it.

Artists surround themselves with beauty, because they have a killer sense of taste. But that taste can be bitter and self-defeating.

Sometime, they need to spend some time with crap.

The shrinking cage

I’ve been trying to find something meaningful to write—a ‘why’—in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing, and of course there are none that are meaningful to me.

The similarity of Fundamentalism across distant times and places and cultures is striking; there must be a similar structure of thought undergirding all of these strains.

The older bomber, Tamerlan, entered music school but abruptly left. Why? Music wasn’t compatible with Islam.

Tamerlan loved music and, a few years ago, he sent Khozhugov a song he’d composed in English and Russian. He said he was about to start music school.

Six weeks later, the two men spoke on the phone. Khozhugov asked how school was going.

“I quit,” Tamerlan said.

“Why did you quit?” Khozhugov asked. “You just started.”

“Music is not really supported in Islam,” he replied.

“Who told you that?”

I have visited souks, khans, and the markets of the Middle East. It is trivially easy to find a music dealer in any of them. I assure you that there is a long tradition of music in Morocco, pop stars rocking Cairo, and jazz in Beirut. Turkish guitar is complex and layered. Arab beats are banging.

And yet, without even knowing what sort of a Fundamentalist a person is, you can probably guess that they believe that music, singing, dancing, acting, drinking, nudity, sex, and sensuality are all forbidden1.

That there can exist a diet that is not simply unhealthy, or forbidden, but genuinely evil. Why is this so common? How can it be that love is verboten?

I’ve a hypothesis.

These things all stir parts of us that are not entirely rational, and therefore not governable by reason alone: the heart, the body, a soul. There is no ‘reason’ to dance. You can map the logic of music, but the actual act of making music has nothing of logic in it. It is common for jazz musicians to disappear into their set. Actors pantomime and absorb the feelings and thoughts of something that is outside themselves: their character, their audience.

We do it for the feeling. For the expression. These things all give names to the nameless. And a nameless thing is beyond the control of the rational mind.

The last moment you have power over these things is the judgement to accept them (or not). So the most possible power your conscious mind can have over this is to say ‘no’. Otherwise, you abandon your critical, reasoning, and judging mind to some extent.

This all hinges on judgement, a perennial favorite among Fundamentalists of all stripes. Judgement seems to give power, but it also entraps. Can you imagine a life without music? With diversion? Without flying kites? All for a feeling of control?

The Fundamentalist sees much in the world that is not divine.

The more you try to hold this focus of mind, the more it escapes you, like squeezed water through you fingers. A woman stirs your loins, so you yell at her to stop being a slut. A book causes you to question, and so it burns in the fire. You catch your toes tapping, so the music is silenced.

Fundamentalism fails to accept that we are more than mind. It posits a stark world of good and bad that steadily shrinks as more and more things get tossed onto the ‘bad’ pile.

It must seem as though the world becomes more manageable as it shrinks, and it does. Prisons are straightforward like that.

Late edition: Jain Clergy supporting terrorism.

  1. Violence and stimulants (caffeine, tobacco, khat) being the common exceptions. ↩

TPM is hiring an entry level news writer:

You need to be a news omnivore or rather a news carnivore because doing the job right requires a keen eye for a TPM story and the ability to pounce quickly — so a news Velociraptor not a Stegosaurus.

Let me tell you why this is great writing. In one sentence, you get the idea of how the job will feel and a sense of the narrative you’ll develop there.

A lot of people (especially college grads) don’t know if they are cautious, or adventurous, or capable of making quick, good decisions. But this gives you a sense of the feel.

I’d bet this’ll get much better matches than the standard, “Entry level position at a fast-paced environment” stuff you see.

Moore’s law applied to life

Moore’s law is an old engineering prediction: that a CPU’s information processing ability will double every two years.

What would happen if we looked at life as an information processing … process? And then looked backwards? This:

It’s from an (arxiv)[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/] paper. What researchers found was that if you assume life to be an information processing entity, than it has origins of about 10 billion years ago, 5 billion years before the Sun formed, and 6 billion before our very own Earth.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong. The 10 billion year estimate puts the origin of life at around when there when the interesting elements were first being spread by the death of the first generation of stars.1

But, I think they forget their starting point:

They say there is good evidence that bacterial spores can be rejuvenated after many millions of years, perhaps stored in ice.

Once you start to look at life as an information processing entity, you can go back a lot further than bacteria, or even DNA. The simplest biological information processing units are proteins.

Each protein is set to recognize a single molecule (or family of related molecules), merge with it, transform it, release it, and then get ready for the next encounter. Flawlessly and neigh endlessly, each protein recognizes information (that’s a yes|no!) and then transforms it. Boom — computation. The simplest proteins are made of CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen) and have no trouble existing in interstellar space or comets. If the authors are going to redefine what life is, then they need to broaden their horizons a bit more.

I can buy that proteins go back 10 billion years ago. A cloud or soup of CHON will produce them through Brownian motion, and they’ll start computing the moment they hit something they ‘recognize’. The longer they go on computing, the more evolved and stable the whole system will become.

I feel like this is good work. It provides a really good answer to Fermi’s Paradox.

  1. The first stars were made of hydrogen, helium, and lithium. As they burned, these atoms fused into heavier and heavier elements. Those elements were released into the cosmos when those stars went nova. ↩

The central matter

As we age, our brains betray us. They take longer to work, they forget things, and they betray us in numerous ways. I can now no longer recall what I have forgotten from school. I have forgotten that I have forgotten.

Physics places some strict limits on the brain; it cannot grow past the skull, it must stay within a narrow temperature range, it craves about 1/5 of the body’s energy budget. It is as physically fragile as grandma’s green Jell-O surprise.

I’ve been lucky enough to touch (an unused) one; the gray matter comes up on your fingers. I washed dreams down the drain with soap.

I’ve come to think that the problem with aging has little to do with degradation of the machinery. The electrons still flow as quickly as ever, and the information of memory and processing is stored in the structure of synapses, not the cells themselves. And it’s the structure that I would like to point to.

That’s the part that degrades, or, rather, fills up. One of the things a brain does is the it creates a traversable order from a chaos of neural connections and weights. As an infant, we have a plastic brain, a blank slate, on that will accept virtually any circumstance or information. That information can be recalled, processed (and does the processing!), and used to project into the future. As we age, learning, thinking, and recall become more difficult; there are less and less potential configurations that our brain can be in. As we accrete experience, our brain loses potential.

As we age, we forget. We forget things that aren’t important to us anymore; this frees up connections and weights for more useful information. But it also changes the way that the brain processes information, since the part of the brain that does the remembering and processing are the same.

The reason our cognitive abilities degrade (I hypothesize) is not so much because our brains become cobwebbed; it’s because they become so full of complicated connections that are not forgotten. That space is much more difficult to traverse than than a new life with fewer experiences. Aging is an inevitable walk into entropy, for the body, for the brain.

There’s a good SciFi hook for you there too. What happens if medicine can make us immortal, but the only way to rejuvenate our brain function were to reset it? It would be functional reincarnation.

Management

Scott Adams theorizes that “Management exists to minimize the problems created by its own hiring mistakes.”

I’d generalize it to: management exists to create conditions under which management will continue to exist.

Think of it this way; if management solved all the structural and personnel problems at a business their raison d’êtra would cease. But, being people with mortgages and kids to send to college, management makes decisions that justify, support, and retrench their places in an organization.

For instance, many (most?) sales teams are composed of: Accounts, salespeople, and a sales manager. Having been a part of one (a big one with multimillion dollar accounts) and an observer of many more, I’ve noticed that there is a ton of the work in a sales team is simply squabbling. What do you do when two accounts merge? Squabble. What do you do when a contact moves to someone else’s account? Fight. What do you do when another sales person nabs an account you have been prospecting for weeks? Kill.

Which is why you need a sales manager. Someone has to sort this out.

But what happens when you have a conflict between the East Coast Team, and the Chicagoland team? Then I you’ll need a VP of Sales.1

See how this sort of structure keeps rationalizing and reinforcing itself?

There are a few difference in how organizations make money that make this happen. There are roughly two ways of organizing human beings: networks and hierarchies. Hierarchies make money by extracting value from limited resources. Networks create value by distributing free, or very cheap, resources.

The easiest way to make money with a hierarchy is to have a monopoly on a resource.

The easiest way to make money selling free stuff? Well, you can’t monopolize something that everyone has, so that’s out. But you can own the network. Think AT&T. Think Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Google? Well, they don’t own the network of the Internet, but the own the access to it and it’s shape, which is the next best thing.

Managers don’t have a lot to do in a network. All the individual nodes do the distribution and quality control. And since anyone can join a network (indeed, the network’s value increases based on the total value of it’s nodes, not the value of the resources it controls).

Valve owns a network, not a hierarchy. They make hit games, sure, but they put one out every decade or so. Their real money maker is Steam, an online game distribution, matchmaking, authentication, and backup service. There are others, but Valve owns the only network that matters. Just like Facebook, or Twitter.

Anyhow, Valve does hire good people. Check out the Valve Employee Handbook. It’s pretty awesome.

  1. I have always advocated a sales team that does it’s own hiring, training, firing, and goal setting. Removing those aspects removes buy-in, and thus a true sense of accountability. “But what about bonuses? This is all sounding very Communist.” Well, more like Socialist, but sure. I’d move to quarterly team bonuses. This cuts the fighting over accounts, and reinforces that the job just needs to be done. It also makes it clear who is and isn’t pulling their weight. The team can address why; should there be more training? A shifting of responsibilities? Or does someone need to get sacked? ↩

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