i read red rosa so you don't have to

Red Rosa by Kate Evans (July 2018)  

Rosa Luxemburg was an iconic radical and revolutionary who many have chosen to describe on the internet with no fewer than a million descriptors: philosopher, economist, socialist, martyr, activist, pacifist, and, most importantly (in the context of this post, of course) - the subject of Kate Evans's Red Rosa. I checked out this book as a direct result of how much I enjoyed Threads, Evans's work about Europe’s current refugee crisis, and like Threads this biography was written in the same comic book style.

As I expected, Luxemburg’s beliefs are a significant influence throughout Red Rosa. Her disgust with the capitalist system’s flaws and shortcomings form the basis of a number of the book’s most interesting insights. I thought the description of money was one such insight. The flaw of using money as a means of exchange is how it establishes a social relationship between two objects. This allows people to value objects based on the work that went into the object’s creation. Over time, the familiarity of such a system gives people the tools to treat each other like objects, doing so by weighing a person against the sum of the work that went into his or her net worth. The failure of the system comes when people no longer need to interact at all, instead replacing interactions with valuations. This form of interaction separates people from the work of assessing what others need and, eventually, allows inequality not just to exist but also to seem natural, inevitable, and irreversible.

It is oversimplifying on my part to reduce the all of the book’s lessons down to one insight, of course, but I feel that the way Luxemburg viewed the role of money, value, and profits in the role of chronic inequality was the most important theme of Red Rosa. It demonstrates why those who believe that it is important for a society to consider how many mouths a person has to feed will always have deaf ears for arguments about capitalism’s strengths and successes. This might seem a stubborn point of view but, as Red Rosa points out, a person whose eyes are opened to the juxtaposition between wealth and poverty is destined only to see it everywhere, and in everything.

The final thought I liked from the book was about how inspirational teachers are those who never stop learning. A teacher who constantly learns models the very behavior he or she is trying to instill in the student. In this way, I think of inspiration as the task of setting a good example and showing others how to do what they are trying to do.

tales of two cities, vol 12: may '17, part 1

05/01/2017
Copley Square - Dartmouth St at Boylston St (7:33 pm)
Tremont St at West St (7:43 pm)

Despite my failure with the East Boston bike, my plan to ride all the unicorns is well underway. I spot the Greenovate unicorn, a bike symbolically launched to bring awareness to the local community about the city's climate action plan. This plan, if I understand it correctly, aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 25% by 2020 and 100% by 2050.

One hundred percent? That seems ridiculous - I suppose farting while riding a Hubway will become a fine-worthy offense in that dystopia. Maybe that's when I'll move to the suburbs.

Just for the record, I like the spirit of the plan. I just think maybe a lower number, like 99%, could be a better target, and more realistic.

05/03/2017
Cambridge Main Library at Broadway / Trowbridge St (3:36 pm)
Danehy Park (3:55 pm)

Mass Ave between Harvard and Porter Squares was the first time I noticed a real change in the quality of the on-street biking experience. The exact moment was sometime in the fall of 2015 - after doing a little repaving work, the city drew bike lanes to help keep drivers from drifting far-right on the long journey towards a Tavern In The Square or Charlie's Kitchen.

Cambridge did not stop there, though. In one small section of the road, the bike lane has been expanded and pushed closer to the sidewalk. To accommodate the wider space, the city removed the on-street parking spaces.

As I breeze down the luxurious lane, it occurs to me that the increased safety is not a result of the wider lane or the better separation from the automobile traffic - it is just the removal of the on-street parking. Getting rid of on-street parking would probably make every street 90% safer for all cyclists.

I wonder if cities frame the trade-offs in that way - do we wish to give residents and tourists a place to park for FREE (or almost free) or shall we try and minimize the inevitable fatalities that result when bikes must navigate among moving and parked cars? I am starting to wish that cities who are simply choosing to prefer one group of its denizens over another just state such decisions outright (we prefer car drivers over cyclists because they buy more stuff, contribute more tax revenue, and so on).

It would certainly be a major improvement on the current method of layering policy moves in double-and-triple speak about how they wish to make the roads safer while preserving parking options, they want to improve the city experience for everyone, and blah blah blah...

05/10/2017
Charles Circle - Charles St at Cambridge St (1:30 pm)
Cambridge Main Library at Broadway / Trowbridge St (1:53 pm)

I get the Fenway Park unicorn, the third of eight in the system. According to the Hubway website, the Red Sox are long-time Hubway supporters who 'encourage ticket holders to use Hubway to get to the game'. Huh? There are, like, eighty spaces for bikes near the stadium that seats (and stands) nearly 38,000.

Maybe they just want everyone to rack up overuse fines while circling the stadium looking for an empty rack.

05/13/2017
Washington Square at Washington St. / Beacon St. (11:08 pm)
Kenmore Square (11:23 pm)

It has been a sloppy start to the spring for me. On this trip, I find myself coming home from Brookline in a light rain. Things are OK for the first three or four seconds. Then, I start down a small hill and, as I approach the intersection, pull gently on the brakes. And again...

Nothing!

I've never had shot brakes before and I'm not sure what to do. I opt for the logical thing - I just zip down as fast as ever, trying to beat the light. I do, easily, but in hindsight I think perhaps I should have a backup plan ready next time.

The next morning, I log onto the computer ready to send a ranting and raving note to Hubway about their death traps. I log onto their 'report a repair' page. There are many options - one says 'bad brakes' and, for some reason, I settle for clicking that. I never do put my rant together.

I wonder if there is a lesson for customer service in here somewhere. Maybe putting in easy to choose options can defuse a situation?

05/17/2017
Cambridge Main Library at Broadway / Trowbridge St (8:58 pm)
Central Square at Mass Ave / Essex St (9:06 pm)

Central Square at Mass Ave / Essex St (9:16 pm)
Charles Circle - Charles St at Cambridge St (9:29 pm)

The traffic pattern in Central Square has gone through a recent change. Instead of allowing left-turns from Mass Ave before straight-ahead traffic, the left-turns now come second. This means more waiting than in the past but gives pedestrians assuming the right to cross some extra time to make their trip safely before left-turning cars and bikes zip through the crosswalk.

05/27/2017
Charles Circle - Charles St at Cambridge St (11:40 am)
Cambridge Main Library at Broadway / Trowbridge St (12:04 pm)

As I cross the Longfellow Bridge into Cambridge, a woman points at the bike and says 'Das Hubway'. Sounds pretty good, I think, right before my thoughts are interrupted by a bug splattering into my forehead.

It must make for a gruesome sight. As I wipe the muck away, I wonder if helmets come with windshields. All the rain of the recent weeks is going to make it a greener summer than usual.

leftovers – journal of a solitude (the bb eats lunch in solitude)

Toward the end of this reading review, TOA noted that nothing disrupts a day like a planned lunch. I thought this was an important point and wanted to expand on it today from the perspective of an office worker.

From my work experience, I’ve always felt that the most productive thing I could do was to make it possible to keep working if I was getting an unusually high level of work done. The planned lunch becomes a major obstacle if thought about in this context. Consider this, reader – if you are having a very productive morning, is it better to stop working when the lunch bell rings or to continue working until you need a break? It’s different for everyone, I acknowledge, but I encourage those who’ve only tried one approach to experiment with the other.

A similar thought comes to mind when I think about meetings. A worker who happens to be most productive when working in uninterrupted two-hour chunks should try to schedule meetings in one block at either the start or end of the day. Like a planned lunch, a meeting that pops up midday is going to do nothing for you if you are having a burst of high productivity.

reading review - the seven deadly chess sins (master pu's pu-pu platter)

Hi folks,

I think it's been a little while since we brought Master Pu around (editor's note: almost a full year) but I figured 2019 might be a good time to get him back involved on TOA and see if we can't get anywhere with his brief but insightful brand of wisdom.

Good luck, reader.

Tim

******************

Thinking by analogy is dangerous because of possible misapplications. Beware of applying the reasoning from one game to any other, especially if the move, concept, or pattern is one you liked.

This is like making a hiring decision because the candidate reminds you of someone else.

It is very easy to become bound and influenced by popular dualities.

Who is the great fool that first presented ‘cat or dog’ as a mutually exclusive pair?

Good moves are good moves before they become any specific type of move. A player who thinks in terms of types of moves is less likely to come up with good moves than a player who simply thinks about good moves.

A good chef cooks his last meal of the night with the same vigor and passion as the first; the great chef must be told to go home for the restaurant has closed.

Generalization becomes useless when there are more exceptions than rules. Generalizations also lose value when the actual situations they describe are few and far between.

Though insightful, this thought describes no specific situation.

The difference between a pair and two of something is that in a pair one partner relies on the other to complement for shortcomings, weaknesses, or particular inabilities. In chess, the bishops are often referred to as a pair because of the square-color restriction. The knights, on the other hand, are interchangeable and therefore not referred to in the same fabled way as ‘the two bishops’.

Those with significant weaknesses should seek out a partner; those with significant strengths should seek out an alternate.

A good way to limit a piece’s potential is to force it to hold onto material. Along the same lines, a position is strengthened whenever the total energy of the pieces is highest. If a material sacrifice improves the lot of the rest, it must be done.

This thought easily extends to financial matters.

When a piece is needed for attack, do not deputize it for defense. If this requires another piece to take up an unsung position on the board, do it – the rest of the army will be grateful.

Those accustomed to asking – ‘what specific qualities are required to succeed in this particular role?’ – will find that these ‘counter-intuitive’ insights come quite regularly to them.

Young players see things very clearly from their own perspective – as they age, they learn to see things from other points of view.

The young complain about being misunderstood; experience means admitting that you do not understand.

Quantum mechanics states that an observer alters the very nature of what is being observed.

It took the field thousands of years to reach this discovery?

Time shortages lead to simplifying decisions based on certainties such as checks or captures. Players must recognize this tendency and fight the urge to make only such moves.

Schedule the day so that your mental state is aligned to the task.

reading review - journal of a solitude

Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton (May 2018)

One Saturday afternoon, I was reading May Sarton’s account of living alone in (New Hampshire?) while riding a bus out to visit a friend. A woman sitting near me got my attention and commented that ‘it seems like a sad book’. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms but it didn’t take me very long to agree. They say not to judge a book by its cover – or in this case, by its title – but my traveling companion’s verdict was spot on. Journal of a Solitude covers many different emotions but at the heart of it is an ever-present melancholy borne of Sarton’s isolation.

One of Sarton’s thoughts jumped right out at me in my reading – the way we handle depression is far more interesting than why we become depressed. It served as a thesis statement of sorts for the book and her insights often expanded on this thought. In one section, she notes that fulfilling simple, living needs – like feeding a cat – always brings joy back into life. In another, she writes that the value of solitude comes in feeling the full force of the inner storm, a practice that becomes impossible when others are around to help cushion against these attacks from within. For Sarton, the pleasure of having friends and family around came with the risk of sending the truth of her inner turmoil back into hiding.

One challenge this book met head-on was the difficult task of examining the private until the universal revealed itself. By examining her innermost fears, dilemmas, and desires so closely, Sarton helps the readers who are working tirelessly to resolve their own problems by allowing them to find kinship in her experiences. The way Sarton observes her life and harnesses her emotions gives her readers the opportunity to see themselves in the narrative. I'm also sure that countless others have used her writing as a starting point in their own efforts to teach, motivate, or comfort others who are struggling through their own version of Sarton's story.

But although the book shares many positive moments as it relates to solitude, ultimately a thought Sarton shares summarizes this book’s main lesson – what others have done with solitude does not mean we should prop up the myth that this is good or, for most people, possible. It can be misread ironically, I suppose, since on the surface the book itself seems to be doing the very thing this statement warns against. However, I think such an interpretation would be mistaken. Sarton never glorifies nor encourages solitude – she simply observes her life in great detail and, in the process, produced this book that I felt was one of the best I’ve read so far this year.

One up: Longtime TOA readers will know that I enjoy coming across informal definitions about art (and artists) in my reading. In this book, Sarton proposes that great artists must demand the impossible while also retaining the capacity for despair when they cannot have it. She adds that as artists age, they constantly are challenged to maintain one quality or the other for the sake of maintaining the tension needed for creating art.

One aspect I like about this definition is how easily it is applied to non-artistic fields. A creator must constantly think of something that does not exist and feel so affronted by the fact of its non-existence that he or she takes the initiative to bring it into the world. Though despair might not always be the perfect word for this situation, broadly speaking I think it emphasizes how the long journey from fresh inspiration to completed invention requires the creator to feel that something important about the world is missing until the impossible invention restores natural order.

One down: I disagreed with the thought that it is impossible to derive a sense of accomplishment from tasks that, by nature, are never complete. Sarton cites housework as an example of such a task (and there are many others).

My disagreement comes from how most of everything I enjoy doing tends toward the unfinished. When I run, read, or write (the “Three R’s”) I almost never stop to think hey, I’ve finished but I do frequently feel a sense of accomplishment whenever these activities go well for me.

I wonder if Sarton herself might disagree with the thought. In another portion of the book, she points out how hobbies that cannot be hurried are valuable because they remind us that not everything can be rushed to completion. Even though a hobby can be valuable even if it does not bring a sense of completion, it is hard for me to look at these two ideas separately and imagine believing in each thought simultaneously.

Just saying: Sarton comments that there is nothing as disruptive to a day as a planned lunch. Her biggest gripe about planned lunch is how it brings an unneeded restriction to the open-ended nature of a productive morning.

I’m not sure I ever thought about it in those terms but I think I’ve always agreed. A close look at my calendar reveals a lack of lunch plans. In fact, the only times I ever plan a lunch are when I already have another event going on around lunchtime. This implies, I guess, that I’ve always intuited what Sarton does so well to put into words.

leftover #1.1 – the illustrated book of sayings (song of the month bracket)

In my first leftovers post, I mentioned how I’ve always studied competition formats. What I could have added is that I’ve also tried to apply my knowledge about these structures whenever possible. These applications took place in all manners of ways – organizing backyard competitions in the summer, arranging tournaments for drinking games at parties, or tweaking the standard playoff format for my fantasy football league.

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time arranging similar things that existed strictly in my own head. These are a little harder to explain in print – let’s just say I had a pretty active imagination as a kid. (Of course, readers who struggled through my Lost In Translation bracket will have a good idea about what I mean, so maybe this isn’t such a hard concept to explain…)

Anyway, my most recent such venture has been with music. For a few months earlier in the decade, I got in the habit of making monthly playlists. These served as unofficial records of what music I liked the most in a given month. At some point, I stopped making these playlists. One day, I impulsively deleted the playlists.

This is a decision I (sort of) regret. It occurred to me a couple of years ago that I would have enjoyed looking over these lists every once in a while. After wallowing in my own despair for a few days, I decided to start tracking again. Instead of just making a list, however, this time I took a different approach and made brackets at the end of each month. I then went through the songs in pairs, eliminating one at a time, until I was left with a definite ‘song of the month’.

I like this approach better. It gives me a sense of what I liked most during a given month while also making the process a little more interesting than just writing down song titles. It has been a couple years of this now and I have a fairly extensive archive of what I was listening to in a given month.

But surely, you are wondering, what does all this mean for my weekend? Well, reader, the simple answer is that it means nothing. However, every once in a while I probably will mention a song or two in a newsletter, and now we'll all know that I didn't just decide to include it on a sudden whim.

On a broader level, I think my (sort of) regret about deleting my old playlists points to how it might not be such a bad idea to take a few minutes every once in a while to record what's on my mind at the moment. I'm not talking exactly about a journal or diary here since those methods feel a little more involved - I'm thinking more like a simple list, the sort we can lookup on Wikipedia for more official awards shows like the Grammys or Oscars. When I really think about why I waste so much time doing things like the Lost In Translation bracket or the TOA Awards, I think this paragraph is the explanation - it might not matter much today what I thought about the books I read last year, but I bet in twenty years I'll probably be happy to have these posts for reference.

reading review - the seven deadly chess sins (running the rule)

Hi all,

Surprisingly, we here at TOA headquarters are running out of things to write about this book…

I thought today I’d run the rule over some of the lingering ideas and compare it against my own experience.

All the best,

Tim

Thoughts on decision making...

A player must learn to analyze at a macro-level first before investigating micro-level options.

Bad lines of thinking often start with an emotional component – for example, a player wants to mate the king, then analyzes the position. But why look so far ahead? An increasingly strengthening position will lead to mate. Another way to say this is that troubled analysis starts with a prediction about the outcome.

The two pieces of advice work together to make an important comment on getting a positive result – don’t try to engineer the result! The key is to look at position and think about it from the highest possible level. It doesn’t matter if the analysis leads to a sequence of moves that don’t even look in the direction of the opponent’s king. Eventually, a player who improves his or her position with every move will maximize the chances of victory.

Obsession with the result clouds judgment. A player who has just blown a chance to win may look to avoid a drawn position merely by the feeling that the game should be won.

Anyone who has competed knows the feeling of the blown opportunity. However, the feeling rests on a fallacy of sorts – the assumption that nothing would go wrong from that point forward. Though we all like to think of ourselves as perfect performers, the reality is that most competitions are decided when one competitor takes advantage of the opponent’s error. Recognizing that most competitions are error-strewn affairs is the first step toward building the resilience needed to rebound quickly from setbacks.

Conventional wisdom often encourages us to look at aspects of a situation that are not the most important features to consider.

A helpful habit is to ask – will further thought be beneficial? A close second is to wonder – is this problem solvable and how long will it take me? Understanding the answers will help the decision making process a great deal.

The most interesting thought I encountered during my job search was Amazon’s core value about making fast decisions. In summary – most decisions are easily reversible and therefore do not require extensive analysis.

I liked the idea for the way it turned the conventional decision making process on its head. The core value did not ask if the decision had a good return on investment, if the pros outweighed the cons, or if your boss would liked. The core value simply asked how long it would take to empirically observe whether the decision was a good one. This makes a ton of sense – for most businesses, and even for most people, the core operating constraint is time.

Those who have asked for a free sample before making a purchase understand this idea. Is it better to read a long list of ingredients and ask others for reviews on a particular flavor of ice cream – or to simply have a little taste?

Comments about learning and teaching...

The most challenging aspect of learning to incorporate new patterns is the way this often challenges players to dismantle old patterns.

When something appears wrong about a position, it often signals an error with a player’s expectations rather than a problem with the position itself.

Self-loyalty is always in play whenever we remain committed to an erroneous  assumption. The teacher who understands this dynamic will succeed. Most people are capable of learning anything – the problem is that most have yet to learn how to unlearn something. These old thought patterns create a lot of overhead – the teacher who thinks he or she is teaching one thing is really asking the student to dismantle an entire process or routine that consists of many more things.

We can frame our changes as 'growth' but the reality is that if I change how I do something today, it means I was mistaken about how I did it at some point in the past. The consistent challenge of getting older is the commitment we make to our past decisions. Loyalty to the past self is commonly the hidden factor whenever we are reluctant to initiate a change.

Taking the initiative...

Short-term advantages must be converted into something lasting before the moment is lost. If a player accepts that material values fluctuate throughout a game, it becomes clear that certain material advantages are short-term and must be converted before it is wiped out by a value adjustment.

The side with initiative must play vigorously – otherwise, it risks losing the initiative.

I once read about a company whose mission statement included a remark about achieving ‘sustainable long-term profits’. This is utter nonsense and reveals a willful ignorance of basic economics – when there are profits, other firms enter the market and start to chip away at the margins. Profits are always short-term to the extent that every natural instinct among those involved in a free market is to chip away at the profit until it is gone.

A profitable firm in this situation does not have long to translate these profits into a fundamental long-term advantage. It could use its profits to invest in employees, build up infrastructure, or lower prices for loyal customers. Each strategy comes with different likelihoods of building a long-term edge.

Great players opt to translate material advantage into positional gains. This does not endorse throwing away the hard-won extra pawn but rather points to how a superior position is easier to manage than playing with an extra piece.

Materialism means seeking to regain what was just sacrificed rather than trying to gain initiative from it.

Just as the old managerial truism goes – what gets measured gets managed – so it goes in chess, at least with a slight twist. A piece is easily measured and therefore often becomes the sole focus of the amateur player’s strategy. The question of position or initiative is harder to measure and therefore more difficult to incorporate into a strategy.

Forcing any piece guarding two dimensions (for example, a bishop defending a pair of diagonals) to make an arbitrary decision is a good way to learn about the opponent’s assessment of the current position. From the other side, if forced to arbitrarily move a piece out of danger, look for a way to misdirect the opponent.

Sometimes, there is nothing as telling as an arbitrary decision. Let’s say I have two regular social outings on my weekday calendar. One is on Tuesday and the other is on Wednesday. When asked about which one I prefer, I give a noncommittal response – oh, I like them both, they’re both great, I always enjoy myself, and so on…

Suddenly, the Tuesday outing moves to Wednesday. Guess who has to answer the question now?

Forcing errors means playing on an opponent’s awareness of his or her fallibility or shortcomings.

As I’ve written here in the past, those who cannot swim must fight their battles on the riverbank. So it goes in reverse – if your opponent cannot swim, never engage in a riverbank battle.

the cadence of language evolution

The first time I came across the word cadence was while reading a novel when I was in middle school. The story was about a third-string quarterback who is suddenly thrust into a starting position due to a combination of injuries and suspensions. Although his physical abilities are limited, the third-stringer is a savvy operator and uses his smarts to lead the team to an improbable victory.

One of his ideas was to trick the opponent into thinking the play was about to start by yelling complicated signals to his team. The quarterback worried, however, that his own teammates might be fooled and commit the same mistakes he wanted the opponent to make. This was because his teammates might not be used to his cadence (definition - a modulation or inflection of the voice) and the lack of familiarity could throw them off during the game.

The next time I heard cadence was at my new job. I was told on different occasions to schedule meetings at my preferred cadence or even at a cadence that worked for me – once a week, every other Thursday, monthly, or whatever. I was confused during these interactions because my understanding of cadence didn’t align with how my new colleagues were using the word. The basic difference was that I thought of cadence as a word that related to the voice and its various inflections while my new colleagues were essentially using the word interchangeably with pattern or rhythm. This bothered me for a little while, perhaps bothered me in the same way it might bother me to see someone wearing socks on their hands, but eventually it just didn’t matter to me anymore.

I suppose what I’m really talking about here is the way language evolves over time. It isn’t about whether the word is right or wrong. I think people spend far too much time worrying about the right meaning or definition of a word. The important thing isn't the definition, it's whether other people know what the hell you are talking about. My colleagues might not have met a dictionary standard when they used cadence instead of rhythm but the logic behind how they used the word incorrectly wasn’t very hard to decipher and therefore not a real problem.

It’s fairly straightforward for me to imagine a future where everyone uses cadence in the context of rhythm. A dictionary’s role is to catalog how words are being used and at some point it will need to adjust its entry for cadence rather than demand people stop using a word in the new way it's commonly being used. I’m not sure when this kind of thing officially happens – I suppose it depends on, er… the cadence… of the editing, proofreading, and publishing schedules.

it’s hard to score into your own empty goal

I was watching the Brighton-Tottenham football match just a moment ago when I noticed how some defenders pass the ball differently to their own goalie than do their teammates. The most obvious way to pass the ball to the goalie is to kick the ball right at his feet, of course, but some players kicked the ball slightly to the left or the right of the goalie instead so that goalie had to move outside the frame of his own goal in order to collect the pass. This isn’t a minor detail, I realized, because moving the goalie outside the frame of the goal is a way to massively reduce the downside risk of a backwards pass.

The importance of this is easy to understand through a minor thought experiment – what would happen if the goalie weren’t there? The defenders who kicked the ball straight to the goalie would score a catastrophic own goal while the defenders who kicked to the right or the left would just put the ball out of play for a corner kick. This is the only factor truly at play when players pass the ball to their own goalies. The players who account for the risk of an own goal pass the ball to the left or the right of the goalie while those who were less mindful of the risk opted to kick the ball straight at their teammate.

As I thought more about these passes, I slowly realized that they demonstrated a player’s understanding of risk better than any other play that could happen during the game. A player who passed the ball straight to the goalie was essentially saying – yeah, something COULD go wrong, but why would it since the goalie’s there, and if it does SOMEHOW go wrong, it would be an accident and therefore nobody’s fault. On the other hand, a player who always played the ball to the left or the right was countering – nothing will probably go wrong but sometimes the goalie slips or the ball takes a weird hop or the goalie is doing something unexpected, so better not to risk losing the game when a tiny fail-safe measure like passing the ball five yards left of the keeper ensures safety.

The most important implication of how a defender passes the ball to his own goalie is what it says about the player’s approach in other more important areas of the game. If I noticed a player consistently passed the ball to the left or the right of his goalie, I would take it as a sign that the player was properly accounting for risk in other aspects of the game. I would be surprised, for example, if such a player was frequently caught out of position or occasionally liable to make a reckless slide tackle that might result in a red card. There is nothing scientific about my conclusion but since defending is essentially the art of minimizing the number of goals conceded, I would be perfectly comfortable reading too much into the way a defender passed a ball back to his keeper.

hola chino!

I would be very interested in getting my hands on a list of all the newest things that are considered ‘racist’. I’m not thinking something comprehensive here because I feel like I have a good grasp on all the traditional stuff – the names, the stereotypes, and so on. I’m just thinking more like the new releases from the prejudiced and the bigoted would do because I’m pretty uncool these days, what with my flip phone and internet-free computer, and I’m a little behind the times in terms of knowing all the freshest ways the world is coming up with to offend each other.

Hopefully, having this hypothetical list will help me see all the times I should have been righteously offended that I allowed to pass by unnoticed. A good example is the question ‘where are you from?’ Back in my day, this was a question people asked me when they wanted to know… where I was from… but in these Troubled Times it is a question I’m apparently supposed to answer with ruffled indignation (1). I’m working on it, reader, but I really can’t help blurting out ‘Norwood’ or ‘Tokyo’ before I remember to get upset.

The place where I most frequently forget to be offended by this question is at Haymarket. And though I admit that it would be fun to get all upset so I could come back here and write a fiery post condemning all forms of small talk, I think I’m on the right track – the vendors at Haymarket who ask me where I’m from generally just want to know the answer.

Of course, it helps that Haymarket is, well… let’s just say for those unfamiliar with it, the vendors down at Haymarket speak with a wide range of accents. It seems impossible to me that people could take offense when someone who spells ‘cucumber’ with two K’s asks where they are from. It reminds me of how I react when I hear something that is supposed to be offensive in a complete inoffensive context. One day around a month ago, one of the guys I usually buy spinach or mushrooms from asked me if I was from ‘Jap’. That wasn’t the high point of my day but as it came within a sentence loaded with other mangled words I'll safely assume that my lack of official linguistics expertise doesn't preclude me from identifying an honest mistake. Maybe it’s more offensive that no one in our allegedly great or about to be great again country had bothered to teach him how to speak our language properly, but that’s a rant for another day.

However, every once in a while I do need an extra moment to gather my thoughts. Last week, I was enthusiastically greeted with an ‘Hola, chino!’ And I did indeed stop to consider – does chino mean what I think it means? Later that day I went on Google to investigate and learned that chino isn’t a translation for ‘chink’ or any other of the English language’s great racist inventions. What I learned is that although chino literally translates to ‘the Chinese guy’, it is used in Mexico and Central America in the same way we use Asian.

I suppose all that's left to do here is a little bit of investigative journalism - if I confirm that my friendly vendor is indeed from just across the border, I don’t need to think too much about him calling me chino every time I buy mushrooms. There’s only one way I’m going to know for sure, though. Next week, I’ll ask him – where are you from?

I hope he isn't offended.

Footnotes / why do we call these pants chinos? / the doctor prescribes reality…

0a. A fresh dose of reality…

I think it’s helpful to point out that I consider myself pretty hard to offend.

0b. A second dose of reality…

I think having played sports at a relatively high level really helps whenever I encounter these moments. At some point, most athletes with thin skin will fail just as coaches who value players for something other than ability to contribute to the team will lose. A true meritocracy suffocates the life out of racism.

1. A third dose of reality…

I think this is a stupid question because I often find it unclear exactly what I’m being asked – I’ve graduated from kindergarten in two countries. Context counts, which is important, and in the same way this question is racist or offensive in a certain context it can also be just a vague question in other contexts. As always, I recommend asking questions about the things you want to know the answer for, and doing so with clear and precise language.

leftovers – sitcoms are about the situation

My original inspiration for this post was a thought about how it was odd that the scripted television show ever became popular in the first place. I realized soon after I started writing that I was incorrect about this point. A better way to put it was that the scripted show was a temporary solution until the problem of how to make reality TV was solved. Game shows and late night solved this problem first and the success of shows like Survivor, Jersey Shore, and Top Chef imply that the natural pressure in TV is for reality programming to take aim at the scripted.

Of course, not everything looks likely to fall victim to the beat of Pauly D. It’s hard to imagine shows that portray dangerous or sensitive situations (like police or medical dramas) would ever be replaced by reality versions (though a show like Cops does suggest a pathway to niche success while the sheer volume of health-related TV suggests a show might break through just by dumb luck). And there are forms of entertainment – like movies – that have no choice but to be made up by at least one person. I suppose it works just like novels – as the complexity of the story increases, people will start to prefer the scripted and created ahead of the spontaneity favored in simpler entertainments.

One other leftover thought – when I heard ‘the cabs are here’ from Jersey Shore, it didn’t feel dated to me in the same way watching George Costanza hail a cab does. I guess this is one advantage reality TV has over its scripted counterparts. When it comes to reality TV, watching someone do the stuff we used to do feels historically accurate whereas in a sitcom we often laugh at the same scenes and marvel at how the behavior was once consider normal.

reading review - the origin of others

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison (June 2018)

Toni Morrison’s short but powerful work is a reflection on the implications of seeing the world in terms of ‘us’ and ‘others’. She links this idea to a number of challenging topics including racism, equality, and globalization. A key insight from this work was how inventing ‘others’ allows the corrupt to create illusions of power. I thought about this for a little while and came up with the following breakdown of how such an invention might come to be.

The first step is to create the concept of ‘others’. The exact methodology for doing this is up to the perpetrator. Such a creation undermines the basic premise of equality many accept as fundamental to our democracy, of course, but people don’t seem to mind too much about this inconsistency once they get used to describing people in terms that emphasize our differences.

Next, demonstrate that the differences between ‘us’ and ‘others’ is relevant beyond surface details. This essentially means stripping away individuality since most individuals want the same things – a good family and social life, meaningful work, and an email subscription to TOA – and such acknowledgements of our shared humanity threaten the survival of the concept of 'others'. A good method here would be to emphasize how 'others' and their behaviors, preferences, or culture will undermine the existing traditions and institutions we – ‘us’ – have come to glorify over the years.

Finally, make the distinction of ‘us’ and ‘others’ seem like a regular feature of the world. This can happen in a number of ways. The simplest way is to have thoughtful discussions about how these distinctions have always existed and are therefore natural features of human life. Though often well intended, these historical discussions define the world in fixed terms that discourage people from trying to bring change.

Is race truly a regular and natural feature of the world? Is it an inarguable feature of human life? Or is race something we continue to discuss because racists came before us and used the very concept to foster their own illusion of power, a power that's left generations of victims in its wake? I'd like to think simply stopping our conversations about race would help but given how addicted society seems to be to its invention of race I suppose less drastic measures are first required to wean ourselves off of our dependence.

A small, simple, but perhaps powerful starting point might be to use language with greater precision whenever we are tempted by the ease and familiarity of racial descriptors. Morrison points out how Africans don’t always refer to themselves as black, preferring descriptors such as ‘Ghanaian’ or ‘Nigerian’ instead. This point spoke to me. I’ve never had a ton of time for food being described as ‘Asian’, for example. What is an ‘Asian’ salad dressing supposed to be? A mix of Indian and Indonesian influences? Or perhaps a blend of Korean and Pakistani pallets?

I suppose worrying about how to describe salad dressing does seem like a silly place to start in the context of race. And of course, replacing racial terms with nationalities is only a minor improvement in the context of dismantling the concept of 'others'. But as any salad eater knows, getting the dressing right is a tiny detail that can make a huge difference. The problem of 'us' and 'others' is a huge question for our age and not likely to be answered with one or two big ideas. Rather, it will take a lot of people paying very close attention to the details of how they speak and think to slowly and surely rebuild the connections that the false dichotomy of 'us' and 'others' has eroded away.

One up: I liked the comment that the most likely way someone becomes a racist is by following another’s example. Although I’m never a big fan of casual, generalized speculation about the inner workings of a young person’s psychology, it does seem like most people are not born racists and most people are not taught racism. What explanation remains for how a person grows up into a racist?

One down: I’m sure my somewhat utopian thought process above looks good on paper and all but the reality is that we are probably generations away from getting anyplace close to what I describe above. Just have a look at the conversation in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election – as Morrison notes, many commentators minimized the role of racism by explaining the result as a ‘populist uprising against Wall Street’. This argument did not explain why many brown or black workers did not vote for Trump despite sharing many of the same motivations as his supporters. In the alleged age of ‘big data’, failing to crunch the numbers and figure out the prominent role of race in voting decisions seems like a glaring oversight to me.

Even I was fooled at the time – I took that idea and ran with it for a while myself. It might not have quite made it into print here at TOA (though it probably did) but that was definitely a thought process I entertained for a short time after the election. And I’m (allegedly) always thinking these things through! I think it goes to show that there is a tendency (and maybe a preference) to explain away racism that is akin to conflating healing with numbing – just because the problem is no longer obvious doesn’t excuse people from following through to get the facts right and tell the story based on these facts.

Just saying: In one section, Morrison writes that globalization is a challenge to find the foreigner within and to seek the commonness in all humanity. I thought this was an interesting approach – in essence, she sees globalization as a challenge of cooperation.

This is a very different perspective from how globalization tends to be framed as a competitive challenge. But I think the distinction is significant. The language we use today to discuss globalization always characterizes it as a generally positive trend with some serious built-in threats to job security and cultural preservation. The inevitable result is yet another excuse to see different people as ‘others’ who are coming to take from us as opposed to working with us.

reading review - the seven deadly chess sins (chess computers)

A couple of decades ago, the expert status of chess grandmasters came under a significant challenge from a long-simmering force: computers. For a few years, the battle raged as humankind’s best representatives went toe-to-toe with (what I assume will eventually be) our future pawn-promoting overlords.

Perhaps the best-known battle from this war was the first game of Gary Kasparov’s 1996 match with IBM’s Deep Blue. Kasaparov employed what I consider a brilliant strategy – he played unusual moves to create strange positions designed to take the computer out of its comfort zone. His idea came after he studied the way the computer analyzed the game and realized it was prone to miscalculations when it was asked to look at unfamiliar positions. (In a way, I suppose this isn’t all that dissimilar to good strategy against a human – study the opponent and try to take advantage of its flaws.) Kasparov lost the game but his approach underscored a deep understanding of the computer's limitations that surely played a decisive role in his comeback to win the match (and, at least for one more year, hold back the unstoppable tide of machine chess).

Rowson does not delve too deep into the world of chess computers in his book, The Seven Deadly Chess Sins. As I mentioned in the previous post, his book is about how humans make uncharacteristic yet systematic errors to lose matches. He did, however, make a throwaway comment that got me thinking a little bit. Here is the general gist of his thought:

“Chess computers stop investigating whenever they conclude that sufficient compensation for an anticipated loss is unlikely. Most sequences that lose a queen, for example, are rejected out of hand simply because it is very unusual to make up for a loss of a queen.”

This ran counter to my expectation for how a computer played chess. My assumption was that a chess computer thought of everything before doing The Best Thing. The method is undoubtedly costly from a computer processing perspective but I figured a machine plugged into the endless wealth of our electrical grid could afford it. However, the way Rowson portrays the chess program paints a very different picture than what I once had in mind.

Let's imagine for a minute that the program’s decision making process looks a lot like a tree. Each time a decision was required, the computer would start at the roots and work its way through the process until it reached a leaf - in this analogy, each of these leaves represents a specific decision. The way I thought a computer arrived at a leaf was that it simply considered each leaf and chose the best possible leaf. What Rowson's thought suggests is that the computer never analyzes all the leaves - instead, it works its way through the various forks and tries to choose the handful of branches that are the most likely to lead to the best leaf. In other words, the program doesn't pick out the best move out of all possible moves, it picks the best first few steps that are the most likely to eventually lead to the best move.

What’s the point of this little aside from the usual urgent business of True On Average? Well, reader, I think it’s a good opportunity to point out that computers think more like we do than is commonly portrayed. This might not be too surprising if you consider that humans made computers – how else could we program them to ‘think’ except in our own image? But even if we understand this, I still think the result is a little counter-intuitive because we assume the computer's vastly superior calculation ability exempts it from needing to think. This might be true in certain cases but as long as a computer's ability to calculate is restrained by our ability to define the formulas and provide the numbers, it will eventually run into the same problem we have and end up doing the most likely thing to be right instead of the absolutely right thing.

Those who understand how computers think create opportunities for themselves. Kasparov’s strategy against Deep Blue is a good example. Some observers might have protested – why not wait until later on in the game to play those strange positions? But by then, the computer would have fewer options – fewer ‘branches’ – to consider, and its likelihood of finding the best move – the best ‘leaf’ – would be much higher than in the early stages of the game.

Kasparov didn’t win in the end. Despite my enthusiastic approval of the tactic, it Kasparov wasn't enough to keep Kasparov from going down to the computer a year later in a famous defeat. Chess is really a results business and a strategy that does not win should only be lauded in the darkest corners of the internet (TOA: where you need a flashlight). A major factor in the defeat was how computers continued to evolve in the year between matches and the kind of processing that was too costly in computing terms just a year ago became feasible with advanced technology. Alas, in the end even Goliath can become powerful enough to calculate the exact trajectories of the stones flying from David's sling in time to step aside and crush all opposition.

However, I think the matches demonstrated an important truth about our future with computers and, in a larger sense, a truth about competition - as long as we are willing to adapt given a particular opponent's strengths and weaknesses, we'll always have a fighting chance. It would be all too easy to look at the result against Deep Blue and say that in today’s world, we are all Gary Kasparovs, fighting valiantly right up to the bitter, inevitable end. This could indeed turn out to be the case. But let’s not forget that Kasparov showed us a universal truth - a computer does certain things well because it does other things poorly. Anyone who remembers this will find that even the longest odds are no guarantee of defeat.

sitcoms are about the situation

A friend recently rewatched a few seasons of MTV’s Jersey Shore, a show that debuted in 2009 just as TV was fully embracing the trend toward reality television. This gave me the opportunity to watch a couple of episodes with him. As we watched, we got into a discussion about how the conversation at the time centered on whether reality TV was merely a fad or a signal of a permanent change in the way we all watched TV. In hindsight, we decided that the question people should have been asking was why the shift hadn’t happened any sooner.

Consider it this way, reader – in most of entertainment, we prefer the living and spontaneous to the scripted and edited. Almost every live sport, for example, has more popularity than professional wrestling, and although sports movies can excite viewers they never elicit the same passion or intensity of those who are in the crowd at the big game. Music fans have always shelled out the big bucks for concert tickets without matching that investment in music videos. And theater buffs will always prefer a live show to seeing the same play on TV in the same way a comedy fan would rather see a stand-up routine instead of simply reading the jokes off a piece of paper.

Looking back, it seems that around the time Jersey Shore debuted it was only TV comedies and dramas that were failing to take advantage of our preference for the spontaneity of a living performance. It’s weird to think that in an industry where people would never dream of scripting the equivalent of a game show that they would continue on for so long without putting the real life inspiration for someone like George Costanza on prime time.

leftovers – i read encyclopedia blazertannica so you don't have to (barry hearn’s rules to life)

In my review of this book, I cited the popularity of Barry Hearn’s appearances on the Men In Blazers podcast. Hearn is mainly known in England for being a sports promoter. His ownership of Leyton Orient, a London-based club that played in England’s third-tier of professional football, and his willingness to discuss his experiences led to a series of guest appearances on the show. His appearances were so popular that Hearn was eventually the guest of honor for his own ‘pod special’, a ridiculous event where he shared his ten rules for life with the Men In Blazers audience.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, I didn’t feel that all of his rules were very useful for me. Rule #8, for example, says - your life does not change by sitting on the sofa. That's an excellent insight, but not one I learned from Barry Hearn. And then there's Rule #1 - it is better to be born lucky than good looking. I might entertain the notion, but my brain works too logically to ignore that being born good looking is in itself an example of good luck.

I do want to highlight those rules that I did like, however, so... without further ado…

Barry Hearn, Rule #2 – tell the truth, because eventually it becomes too difficult to keep track of all your lies.

I like this rule because it disposes of all the higher moral or ethical standards we resort to when trying to explain the importance of honesty. Instead, Hearn reframes it in the most basic, selfish terms that any idiot can understand – lying is stupid because YOU are going to get caught.

The explanation fits Hearn’s personality perfectly. Hearn presents himself as the sort of businessman who has no time for complex philosophies, principles, or analysis. He strikes me as the sort who says – if it’s making money, let’s do MORE of it – and any additional analysis only introduces unwanted complexity. To put it another way, Barry Hearn is about results first and everything else second and nothing exemplifies this position better than being against lying merely because he believes lying isn’t going to work.

Barry Hearn, Rule #3 – work ethic can overcome anything, because we all have the same amount of time during a day but not everyone is willing to make the same sacrifices.

One aspect of Hearn’s appeal was his contrast to all the over-slicked business types that seem to have infiltrated the ownership ranks among the sport’s clubs. With rule #3, Hearn solidifies this difference by emphasizing that success is attainable for those who want to put in an honest day’s work, over and over again. Say what you must about the tenuous link between hard work and massive success, of course, but at least Hearn endorses a better path to club ownership than overseeing a leveraged buyout.

Barry Hearn, Rule #9 – avoid being a secret, because if you wait for someone else to identify your greatness it might never happen.

Sheryl Sandberg referred to this as ‘Tiara Syndrome’ in her hugely influential Lean In and I suppose this is Hearn’s way of making the same point. I think a lot of people feel they have more to offer to their communities, organizations, or even themselves than they are willing to admit, and this reluctance probably leaves a lot of great work unrecognized and a lot of potential unrealized.

Barry Hearn, Rule #6 – unusual things happen everyday but it’s how you deal with them that makes you unusual.

If this rule looks familiar, it is because I mentioned it back in the November newsletter. This thought hit me so hard when I first heard it that I’ve thought about and alluded to it over and over in the weeks after I read The Encyclopedia Blazertannica. We are so easily tempted by familiar patterns that we fail to notice all the ways we decline the new opportunities that come across our path every single day. More importantly, we fail to consider how our lives might change if we reconsidered the automatic responses we give to the situations we regularly encounter in our lives.

when later becomes never

I’ve lived in or around Boston for pretty much all of the last eight years or so. During that time, I’ve done just about everything that appears on those ‘what to do in Boston’ lists with one notable exception – a trip to the Sam Adams brewery.

This fact occasionally surprises people. The brewery ticks many of my boxes – it’s easily accessible by T or bike, it isn’t expensive, and it involves beer. To top it all off, a lot of people I know have been interested in going with me at various points over the past few years. Looking back, it’s kind of a minor miracle that I haven’t been to the brewery.

And yet, when I thought this over the other day the explanation came to me pretty quickly. I haven’t gone to the brewery yet because it’s always just a good idea, one among a group of other good ideas, and usually another similarly good idea ends up becoming the preference. What tends to happen when the brewery comes up as an idea is that we end up doing something similar – South Boston instead of the South End, the Harpoon brewery instead of Sam Adams, an early evening outing instead of the late afternoon – and the minor detail is enough to keep me away from this local institution for yet another day.

Underlying this constant pattern of deferral is my own attitude – I’m going to make it at some point because it’s the Sam Adams brewery. Everyone goes at some point, right? Surely, it’s just a matter of time before circumstances place me at its front door (and my first order of business will be to demand an explanation for the unexplained disappearance of the Blackberry Witbier, but that’s another story.)

But here's a fact - people who measure the time they’ve spent in Boston by days have been there for a tour or a beer while yours truly, who is now about to start using decades as the measurement unit of choice, has never even seen the building from the outside. I'm convinced I'll get there eventually, but lately I’ve started to question my own conviction.

A lot of things do indeed ‘just happen’ but this obscures the fact that a little initiative goes a long way. I’m starting to think, or maybe learn, that the path to never is paved with later. Many of the people I’ve planned on going to the brewery with at some point or another are no longer able to go for reasons of varying permanence – moved to Atlanta, sobriety, death. They say good things come to those who wait but that doesn’t guarantee those good things will arrive in time, or that better things await those who are impatient.

reading review - the seven deadly chess sins (the closed system)

As mentioned in some of my previous posts, the hidden idea of this book is how materialism exerts more negative influence than any other factor in a chess loss. Rowson colorfully takes aim against this particularly irksome ‘chess sin’ with the following (paraphrased) comment:

“Chess is a closed system in the sense that what happens within the game cannot be influenced by factors from outside the game. A pawn is not worth one kiss or one cabbage or one dollar. It isn’t as intuitive to say it isn’t worth one point, either, but it should be obvious why a pawn’s value might change over the course of a game.”

Interesting quote, no? Of course, I think there are some immediately obvious ways to counter this thought. Consider for example a hypothetical game where the winner might get a kiss or a cabbage or even just a dollar as a prize (chess players love cabbage, I’ve heard). At some point in the game, there probably will be a moment when a move is worth a kiss or a cabbage or a dollar in the sense that by making the right move the victory is confirmed and the prize is won.

So, Rowson is wrong, then? Well, I’m not quite sure he’d agree. I think he would contend that this kind of thinking is exactly the sort that he writes about in this book. Humans are uniquely capable of creating association or identifying patterns where none exist. To move a bishop a few squares forward and think about winning a cabbage is a symptom of the problem many chess players experience when about to lose a game. Each positive move does add up or subtract from that final prize, of course, but it doesn’t really matter from the perspective of doing the kind of thinking needed to win the game. In some ways, thinking about what a move might represent in terms of rewards or prizes merely is a distraction, a use of valuable brain resources to think about something unrelated to analyzing positions and determining the best moves.

Perhaps the best way to summarize the book is to refer back to the start of Rowson’s quote – chess is a closed system. Rowson was of course referring to the ‘point value’ system with his quote but the thought applies as well to the mental process of each player. The seven ‘chess sins’ he describes all share a key characteristic in that each one represents some failure on the part of the player to keep the mental system closed. Wanting, for example, means the player is overly concerned with the results and ratings used by outsiders while perfectionism imposes a standard external to making the best move. When these thoughts drift into the mind from outside the game, the player’s performance is suddenly under threat.

The best players win by keeping the system closed and focusing only on making the next move in the game. I wonder if this is the true reason why computers have become so good at playing the game. Though my first instinct is to suggest a computer’s greater processing power is responsible for its victories, it may be that the computer’s ability to ignore all this mental and emotional stuff prevents it from throwing away games from winning positions. In other words, a computer doesn’t win because it can analyze a million positions in a second – it just doesn’t lose because it has no use for all those cabbages handed out to the victor.

leftovers – the toa newsletter, november 2018 (the shit sandwich)

Readers may recall that in this newsletter I made reference to The Shit Sandwich, a strange but apparently widely used method of giving feedback that involves delivering a positive comment before and after a negative one. I noted in this newsletter that I’d heard about a different way and I wanted to expand briefly on the thought today.

The comment I heard was about Gregg Popovich, coach of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, and how he tried to isolate feedback so that his message was either entirely positive or entirely negative. Longtime NBA fans will know ‘Pop’ is considered the league’s best coach over the past two decades and I therefore took immediate notice when I heard this was one of his methods. It makes a lot of sense to me on the surface – by delivering feedback in this way, Pop knows his team isn’t going to arbitrarily ignore one half of the message by choosing to focus on the other half.

However, as I’ve noted in the past, managing a team is a complex business and blindly adhering to one principle or method is a sure route to failure. The problem of strictly negative feedback is that it risks straining a relationship (and the shit sandwich essentially exists to address and resolve this problem by reducing the net negativity of any one interaction). I thought about this after I posted the newsletter and I realized the key goes back to the idea of how good relationships tend to require a ratio of around five positive interactions for each negative one (1). This thought gives me a rough framework to start with as I explore the implications of giving strictly positive or negative feedback – if I must deliver solely negative feedback, I need to make sure I’m following up with a few positive interactions.

Footnotes / like an auction?

1. The five to one rule

I’ve most notably seen this ratio expressed in the context of ‘bidding’, a term researchers use to describe how people build relationships by simply acknowledging each other. The research tends to settle around five to one as minimum viable ratio and predicts negative strain on the relationship if the balance of positive to negative interactions falls below this figure.

1a. Suddenly, I'm hungry...

Just as I was about to hit 'publish', I realized that perhaps this explains why The Shit Sandwich doesn't work (or is another reason why it doesn't work, I should say) - if you are using two positive comments as a frame for delivering the one negative comment, the five to one concept suggests you are coming up three comments short. Might wanna add some bread to that sandwich, chef...

the spirit of radio

I write this on a crisp October morning, just a few days before the Red Sox will play in game one (eh hem, Game One) of the World Series. The team’s great regular season and exciting postseason run has people in town thinking and talking about the team. Inevitably, this has led to a new small-talk question in the past week or so – hey, how about the Sox? In the past, my answer would have been easy – I’m pumped, I'm absolutely pumped. Or, actually, I should say, it would have been more like – actually, I’m pretty nervous, but they got it. Either way, the answer would have originated from the same place, one of obsessed fandom that left me suspect to wild swings of emotion based on whether the team had hit enough dingers the night before. I was into the Sox and the Sox were into me.

This formed a part of a larger persona, almost a caricature really, of The Boston Sports Fan, a role I played almost flawlessly from the moment I arrived alone and friendless at college. If a ball or puck bounced under the Boston sun, I knew about it, and I made it known that I took my knowledge as seriously as anything else to which I’d committed my time and energy. My fandom was such that it made me natural friend and foil to my equivalent classmates from around the country, strange species I classified as the New York Sports Nut or the Bay Area Sports Fanatic, and undoubtedly our shared interest in sports contributed to how we graduated four years later with not just diplomas but as lifelong friends as well.

Inevitably things, as things tend to do, ended. In the same way I stopped listening to Rush or no longer made time to shoot baskets down at the park, I lost my interest in keeping track of the wild card standings or looking up rumors about which shortstop was about to get traded. I don’t do this or the equivalent for any Boston team anymore. I’m sure the days of a shared commitment to American sports serving as a starting point are long over, a hypothesis supported by how the friendships I’ve made or cultivated in my post college years have lacked any trace of sporting interests at their foundations.

And yet, despite having moved on from the Sox, I couldn’t help but feel something as I walked through the city this past week and saw the familiar hats and t-shirt jerseys all around me. It was like unexpectedly hearing the bridge from an old song – suddenly, I’d remember the ending, and look forward to enjoying the rest of the familiar trip before the song was over. When I’ve been asked lately about my excitement for the Sox, I end up thinking back to when I was excited, and the names of all the players and the endings of the most important games come flooding back into my memory.

Sometimes, I think about how crazy it was that these games seemed so important. It’s unfathomable, really, that I used to get so wound up watching playoff games on TV that I would leave the house to listen to the late innings on a radio. It seems even crazier that when the Sox were on the verge of finally winning in 2004 that I agreed with a friend over lunch in the high school cafeteria to meet him halfway between our homes after the final out. But it did seem important at the time that we do something, anything, even just a high-five, to commemorate how unbelievable it was that a bunch of guys in matching outfits won a series of baseball games.

The popular narrative around here is that it all changed after that season, when the Sox finally won in 2004, and I suppose there must be some truth in it. But I still remember caring about the games. On perfect summer nights between college semesters, we’d go out on a bridge, the bridge blocked off to traffic because of construction, and we’d bring a radio and beach chairs and listen to that night’s Sox game as we sat by the water. I’d drink iced tea and my high school friends would smoke cloves and we’d wait together for the game to finish or the bridge to get built because we must have known deep down that something important to us was about to end.

But that was my life back then and, even though things are definitely different now, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to say that things have really changed. My primary hobbies and interests are different, my free time spent reading books or listening to music or exploring the city, and I use these new interests to connect with others, but that’s not much different than worrying together about basketballs, ball fours, or fourth downs. A bridge is only a reminder of how certain things should be connected, and remain so, and I don’t stop on them anymore because I know where I’m going – to weddings or wakes, to visit new houses and meet new babies. The nouns are different but the point remains the same – finding ways to be unobtrusive companions so that we can practice sharing, using the trivial to prepare for the vital, building routines and stability in each other so that we have the foundations we need when life shakes our very core to acknowledge that although everything does end, nothing important ever needs to be over.

leftovers - the 2018 december rereading list

It’s a little early to look down the road at 2019 but sometimes I’m like that kid who writes next year’s Christmas list on the back of the wrapping paper from that year’s gifts. So, here’s my current shortlist for next December, a list I’ll expand out over the course of this year before I whittle it down to the seven or eight I’ll eventually reread.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
The New New Thing by Michael Lewis
Lost In Translation by Ella Frances Sanders
The Illustrated Book of Sayings by Ella Frances Sanders
Born To Run by Christopher McDougall

Sum by David Eagleman

Anam Cara by John O'Donohue

You might be wondering, reader – why share this list now when we all know I’ll write another post in December about which books I picked out? Why not wait until I know which books I’ll reread, then write about those?

Well, I think in some ways the rereading shortlist is an unofficial representation of my favorite books. I get asked questions about my favorite books from time to time so I figured it couldn't hurt to prepare a form of an answer. I recognized that in order to fully prepare, I would need to think beyond just the books I might reread this December. So, I went back through my reading list from 2011 through 2016 and pulled out any book that I might consider on my shortlist for the best book I've ever read.

Here's what resulted:

Tenth of December by George Saunders
Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
First and Last Notebooks by Simone Weil
The Game by Ken Dryden
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
Wasted by Marya Hornbacher
The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin
Rework by Jason Fried
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
Religion For Atheists by Alain de Botton
Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
Fallen Leaves by Will Durant
On Writing by Stephen King
Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson
Still Alice by Lisa Genova
Bluets by Maggie Nelson

And of course, last but not least - Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli...

I don't have any intention of doing more with this list - if anything, I'll just add to it, perhaps by doing an annual look back at my reading list from two calendar years prior. But in the meantime, reader, if you are looking for a book or two to get yourself through the rest of this winter, I highly recommend having a look at this list and giving something a try.

Happy reading,

Tim

leftovers #2.1 – the hitler defense (applied economics): the bb practices leadership

My counterpart at TOA recently shared a story about a job interview gone wrong thanks to a candidate’s misguided application of economic principles. It was a lovely storytelling attempt, no doubt about it, but I think he missed a few important aspects of the story. This is why the work related stuff around here is my domain! So, let me add some thoughts today to help you understand the most relevant lessons from that job interview situation.

First, some of you may be wondering – why continue the interview at all? Surely, after the candidate’s hypothetical example sucked all the oxygen out of the interview room, everyone in the hiring team would have agreed that the hiring decision was clear. Wouldn’t continuing on when the result was already obvious be a clear waste of everyone’s time?

Reader, my response is simple – our team needed the practice. This was a situation with a live job candidate who was giving it his best shot to convince us that he was the ideal person for the job. Our team needed all the chances it could get to interview such people. Without practice, there was no way to improve at conducting job interviews. If I had sent this candidate home after the first round, we would have thrown away an opportunity to hone the skills we would need to conduct a good interview when the right candidate eventually did show up in our room.

This brings me to a larger point about the team. One of our basic operating principles was that we would try to learn from each other every day. This principle looked good on paper (doesn’t it?) but I knew that in many teams such principles often gave way under the many short-term pressures organizations faced all the time (profits, managerial whims, sudden changes of direction, and so on). Under these conditions, I felt just stating the principle wasn’t enough. In order for the team to improve every day, I had to translate the vague concept into a simple action we could take every day – practice.

I’ve written about the value of practice on this space in the past. It’s hard to know exactly what this means, though, in the context of a work environment. In my prior post, I did not make the effort to explain what I considered practice. What did practice mean for a team like mine? It meant training until the trainee was as capable as the trainer. We built up the skills required in a number of ways. We created test projects for new people to work on so that we could assess performance and identify training gaps. We paired novices with experts and arranged shadowing sessions so that knowledge could be transferred informally while also creating formal reference material in the form of documentation and FAQs. We made sure the inexperienced always knew how to get a more experienced teammate to help so that they could fail safely until they demonstrated their readiness to succeed.

All of these methods fall under one general concept – apprenticeship. The essence of our learning principle was a belief that people learned best when they helped someone who already knew what to do. Therefore, practice in our team meant helping someone else complete a job. This resulted in our team becoming a series of ever-changing partnerships where the trainee was responsible for helping the trainer complete an assignment; in return, the trainer would help the trainee learn over time in order to eventually to take over the responsibility for successfully completing future assignments.

At the time of this job interview, the apprenticeship method was already well established within our hiring process. What had started with just me reviewing resumes, reading cover letters, and conducting interviews had expanded to involve most of the team helping me make decisions. I had gone from simply sharing examples of accepted and rejected resumes with the group to asking for the team to make decisions on marginal applications. I was also in the process of transitioning the bulk of the speaking during phone interviews to a team member who had shadowed me on the screening calls since the first day.

The training progression for in-person interviews, however, was very much still in its early days. This was due mostly to a scarcity of strong candidates. Therefore, even though team members had been shadowing me during the interviews since the start of our hiring round, each person had only witnessed a handful of real conversations. So, on this day, even though I already knew the outcome I went back into the room with two more analysts and finished up the second round of the interview as if everything was left to be decided.

I can’t say for sure if I made the right decision (I suppose it isn’t possible to ever know these things for sure). But if I had to do it over again, I would probably make the same decision. Our team’s operating principle meant I asked everyone in the group to learn every day. This meant my role as the leader was to ensure I gave the team every opportunity to learn through relevant practice. If I had cut short the interview after the first round, I would have deprived part of my team the opportunity to practice and failed in my responsibility as the leader.

There is also a broader lesson here about principled leadership. Although principles are important to have on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, the real value of a principle comes during those one-off situations that no one anticipates (and no expects to ever come up again). These moments put the principle to the test. A strong leader in these moments frames the situation in the context of the team’s principles and makes a decision consistent with those ideals. It might not always be easy to do this but a strong leader always remembers that leadership isn’t about me, but we. It’s about becoming the leader we all wished we had when we were younger.

Leadership, like any skill, is mastered through practice, the deliberate repetition of a desired action. The opportunities to practice leadership are few and far between. When such an opportunity comes around, a leader knows it isn’t time to walk away – it’s time to get to work.

Signed,

The Business Bro

i read encyclopedia blazertannica so you don't have to

Encyclopedia Blazertannica by Roger Bennett and Michael Davies (September 2018)

Encyclopedia Blazertannica is a massive reference guide to everything authors Roger Bennett and Michael Davies have discussed on their Men In Blazers podcast. Longtime readers may recall that this is one of my favorite podcasts and that I attended a live recording of one of their shows on the day of the England-Croatia World Cup semifinal – it should come as no surprise that I enjoyed this book a great deal.

The book is, like the podcast, mostly full of insights and commentary into the world of football and the unique way an American must interact with it. No thought summarizes the challenge better than the observation that someone drinking at 7:30 in the morning is an alcoholic… unless that person is watching a soccer game. Surely, in the areas of the world where games are played and televised at reasonable local hours, the joys of a breakfast Guinness remain unknown and, most likely, vilified.

I also want to highlight how much I agreed with the notion that willful delusion is a part of fandom. The authors highlight how this is best illustrated in England through reaction of fans to diving (pretending to have been fouled in an attempt to deceive the referee). In general, fans always berate divers and demand that the deceit must be immediately removed from the game… assuming the diver is foreign, of course. If the diver is English, then the response is always along the lines of – well, he must have felt something, because he’s English and would never do that!

There is more to the book, however, than football and alcohol. I liked the life advice that although knowing your strengths is vital, it is more important to know your weaknesses and determine which ones you cannot improve on. As highly popular guest Barry Hearn once said during an appearance on the show, life is about making the most out of the same twenty-four hours we all get and wasting any of those hours on what is destined to remain fixed is no way to meet that challenge. A good way to apply this understanding is to how we treat an acquaintance – unlike a friend (for whom we should do anything) an acquaintance is someone to make the most of.

Of course, no mention of Men In Blazers – and Roger Bennett in particular – is complete without some reference to poetry (and often to verse about the first World War) (1). As they point out, the poet must be truthful for all a poet can do is warn. It is vital to heed these warnings because a warning ignored isn’t much different from a warning never issued at all – and in life, it is usually what does not get said that causes the most damage.

Footnotes / pretty much everything else they regularly quote is nonsense

1. Ladies and gentlemen, Phillip Larkin…

The most frequently quoted poetry are the following lines from Phillip Larkin’s 'The Mower':

We should be careful
Of each other
We should be kind 
While there is still time

in a way, the PEDs were ironic

I've written (several thousands words) about Moneyball in the past so I worry I've referenced this upcoming point before. But the idea has been in my mind a lot recently and I thought I would just mention it briefly here.

In one section, Lewis describes an at-bat by Jason Giambi, the team's top slugger. A pitch comes in over the plate for a called strike but, as Lewis describes it, Giambi knew he couldn't do much with it and chose to let it go.

It's an underrated but remarkable portion of the book. For many baseball players, a strike is a pitch to swing at (for many, a BALL is a pitch to swing at!) but for Giambi, perhaps the poster child for the team's innovative strategy, taking a called strike was just another way to confirm the highly unusual approach the team took to the game.

There are probably more 'Jason Giambi' types running around than I realize. These people disrupt the 'carrots and sticks' model of incentives and punishments which inform so many of societies policies, procedures, and norms. Some of these people see 'sticks' as necessary transaction costs for a larger goal rather than consequences for harmful behavior: the hungry person who steals bread, the desperate driver speeding a sick friend to the hospital, the fair-skinned triathlete training long enough to get sunburned. Others notice the dangling 'carrot' but decide the work needed to grab it is not enough to justify the reward: the employee who goes home on time rather than putting in extra hours to earn a bonus, the diner who turns down the free dessert in order to stick to a diet, the philanthropist who doesn't bother to write off donations.

reading review - the seven deadly chess sins

Hello reader!

After (approximately) several thousand posts referencing this fine book, we are… finally… ready for a proper reading review for The Seven Deadly Chess Sins.

Thanks for waiting.

Tim

*********

As I mentioned several posts ago, I really liked this book’s focus on how good decision makers made bad decisions. As Rowson takes the reader through a detailed analysis of his ‘seven chess sins’, what becomes clear is how the common thread linking these sins together is the trouble most players have with separating the general from the specific.

In the chess context, what Rowson means is that general trends and broadly accepted thinking patterns tend to dominate the way players learn to analyze the game. This prepares a player to talk in general about chess without always ensuring a player will know how to respond to a specific board during a given game. As the author notes, the relevant question in chess is not whether a rook is worth more than a knight – the relevant question is whether your rook is worth more than your opponent’s knight.

A very chess specific observation I enjoyed (and one of the only ones I understood) was when Rowson described the value of the knight as 'the critical piece (that) brings a circular element to a linear game.' I really liked this observation. It reminded me of how I think of the ways other pursuits incorporate the unusual to create the greatest aggregate effect. One fairly direct example comes from world football. In this sport, the players who are known for cleverly drifting into open space to collect passes are described as ‘playing between the lines’. Again, in a sport where the tendency is to play with linearity, the player who brings value with difference is the one able to think in curves.

A less direct application comes with how organizations report productivity changes when creating diverse teams or implementing new methods. Though it would be impossible to extend the linear/circular dynamic to this example, the idea that different points of view create a fuller picture of a task or problem is certainly not a new concept. As an individual, I can only see what my experiences and training have enabled me to see. With others of a shared background, we’ll all look at the same thing and agree on what we see; with others of different backgrounds, I’ll gain the perspective of those who look at the same thing yet see it completely differently from me.

One up: Rowson does an excellent job of linking task-relevance to his analysis of a given chess piece. Since a chess piece is only valuable to the extent of the work it is doing, he proposes that chess pieces should perhaps be rated for their energy. This means studying a position and understanding what the pieces are doing in the moment and what capabilities lying latent will awaken in its future.

This sounds basic (well, assuming I used ‘lying latent’ correctly) but the application of such thinking is rare in chess. Since a piece’s identity is more easily seen than its energy, the natural trend is to look merely at identity to determine the material value.

This, I’m afraid, is analogous to the way people take shortcuts to determine the value of another person.

One down: Part of the problem in writing a chess book about the problems of generalization is that the thesis of the book is itself a generalization. Rowson himself makes note of the self-referencing contradiction in his own book when he quotes William Blake – to generalize is to be an idiot.

What makes the book work is the detail Rowson brings to his generalization (1). Unlike the players he cites (including himself via examples from his own games), Rowson proves that he is able to separate the general from the specific. Had he not done so, it would be possible to point to the author and say – look at this guy, he talks about the problems of generalizing in a general way!

Just saying: Rowson doesn’t dig too deep into chess computers. I think the topic is avoided for good reason – the ‘chess sins’ he writes about are essentially the mental or emotional problems a player might experience during a game. These problems do not afflict chess computers because computers do not have the capacity to experience these problems…yet.

Footnotes / ! / !?

0a. Disclaimer…

It took me over a year to read this book. It was thick with chess references, chess diagrams, chess terminology… it is definitely a chess book, make no mistake about it, reader. Those who do not have a passing familiarity with chess may struggle to distill the general lessons about decision making from this work.

0b. This… claimer…?

However, I found the book a highly captivating read throughout. I do think it is possible to read this book and get a lot out of it even if you have no idea how chess works.

1. How would you know?

Reader, having read a book or two about chess – including the venerated Chess For Dummies – I feel highly qualified to make comments on what is or is not a great chess book.

i read elbow room so you don't have to

Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (July 2018)

Elbow Room is James Alan McPherson’s 1977 short story collection. I read four of these stories a second time – ‘Why I Like Country Music’, ‘The Story of a Scar’, and ‘I Am An American’ included among them. The story that I enjoyed the most was ‘A Loaf Of Bread’. It was about a man who must make a decision about the future of his business after his community felt wronged by his pricing practices and I thought the story was told in a way that lived up to its excellent premise.

In addition to being a story I liked, I thought ‘A Loaf Of Bread’ also best represented the collection’s broad exploration of the pressure communities place on their members to live up to certain assumptions or expectations. McPherson’s characters react to this pressure in different ways and each story demonstrates how the partnership of community can harm or help us. As one of his stories points out, a person doesn’t outrun threats any faster just because he or she is part of a community – the purpose of community is to establish the strength in numbers that prevent individuals from being targeted by threats in the first place.

There were a few other thoughts I liked from these stories – that advertising always hides a lack of underlying permanence, for example, or that people like music when it connects them to memories or to people in the vicinity. And finally – though I recognize that acknowledging the wisdom of this thought risks invalidating the premise of these ‘reading reviews’ – I did appreciate the observation that always breaking things down into little pieces eventually makes it difficult to fully grasp longer or more complex ideas.

in theory, in practice

Hi all,

Peopleware consistently presented counter-intuitive observations about the office. It did so by restating common theory into how the matter usually plays out in practice. Below are some of my favorites, arranged into the ‘good this, bad that’ structure I’ve used in the past.

In theory… I could go on explaining this for another thousand words.

In practice… I should probably just start, right?

Thanks for – in theory – reading.

Tim

******************

In theory… working overtime gives managers a defense if the project does not get done on time.

In practice… what incomplete project wouldn’t benefit from more time?

When a project doesn’t get done on time, it means the real reason cannot be identified or cannot be stated.

In theory… an autonomous employee is free to do something differently than the manager would have.

In practice… an autonomous employee makes the same decisions the manager would have made.

Autonomy does not mean teaching a team to think like its manager. Managers who do not allow or accept decisions that differ from what they would have done stamp out any semblance of autonomy in their teams.

In theory…  a person without autonomy is of no use to a manager.

In practice… a manager prefers predictable and obedient.

A manager can motivate the team merely by trusting it with his or her reputation. Trust is the highest form of motivation.

In theory… companies with low turnover must be doing something amazing.

In practice… companies with low turnover must retrain constantly.

High turnover can mean departing employees are unable to find new roles within the organization. This is often due to a failure to retrain for new roles. Since many employees leave when they are not being trained very well to begin with, having better training can improve retention in two ways – employees will have less reason to leave a role and will have more opportunity to transition into new roles.

In theory…innovation is desired.

In practice… busyness limits innovation.

The most common way to limit innovation is to keep everyone busy. If employees have no time for anything except their assignments, when will they have time to innovate? In the worst organizations, innovation is framed as insubordination because innovations are evidence that an employee is spending time on something other than a specific assignment.

In theory… uniformity creates a sense of unity, camaraderie, and togetherness.

In practice… uniformity exposes the insecurity of management.

Too many companies suffer today because they lead through an outdated model of ‘the assembly line that produces widgets’. This method of management works if employees are indistinguishable from each other, the desired work output is always clear, and the method of production is primarily based on manpower. The less these factors apply, the less appropriate the assembly-line model of management.

In theory… professional means knowledgeable or competent.

In practice… professional means unsurprising.

I have nothing to add.

In theory…productivity improvements are permanent.

In practice…most easy productivity improvements have already been implemented.

This thought explains how problems we’ve solved keep coming back. Congestion is a good one. An extra lane of traffic is added to reduce traffic – next week, those who used to stay home because of the traffic start driving again… and create the next traffic jam.

In theory… a big project backlog is full of good projects to work on.

In practice… a big project backlog is a list of bad ideas to throw out.

Organizations always implement projects that will bring in a profit. This is a direct contradiction to the theory of the backlog – a list of ‘profitable’ projects that are mysteriously not being implemented. Once someone calculates the true cost-benefit ratio, a project in the backlog usually moves to the reject pile.

In theory… music does not inhibit thinking.

In practice… music may inhibit sudden bursts of inspiration or creativity.

This is all ‘left brain, right brain’ stuff (not an upcoming post!) and I’m not entirely sure I understand all of it. The basics are that since music is processed in the same side of the brain that also handles creativity, listening to music while working crowds out brain space and makes it less likely that a given worker will come up with creative solutions.

In theory… motivational posters remind employees of important concepts.

In practice… motivational posters confirm management’s fears.

The employee who looks at these posters all day eventually realizes that managers do not believe employees are capable of remembering critical job concepts on their own.

In theory… deadlines drive action and communicate importance.

In practice… deadlines reveal a reluctance to fund a low-value project beyond a particular date.

This point is better understood with a quick reminder about deadlines – if the project really must get done, everyone involved understands it and no one requires a deadline to keep things on track. The chief at a fire, for example, does not walk around reminding the firefighters of deadlines.

In theory… a ‘working meeting’ is a clever, value-added variation on the traditional meeting.

In practice… if there is ever such a thing as a ‘working meeting’, it implies the rest are ‘nonworking meetings’.

Easily negated adjective go a long way…

A similar phenomenon is the ‘stand-up meeting’. These are designed to move with greater efficiency and urgency than the traditional ‘sit-down meeting’. But all this really does is confirm that the traditional ‘sit-down meeting’ is inefficient and not urgent. Instead of having everyone stand up for certain meetings, a better use of time would involve studying sit-down meetings and determining why they are so unproductive.