reading review - a room of one's own

There seems to be a consensus to describe this work as an extended essay, whatever that means. Why not just say "essay"? I worry that some may be put off by the implication that this work falls into some unreadable limbo between essay and book.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (January 2021)

For those who need more information to make a reading decision, I'll cut right to the chase - Woolf's main point is that in order to write fiction, a woman must have a room of her own, which implies a certain degree of accompanying financial support. Despite not being the fiction for which she is known, Woolf's superlative writing is on display in A Room of One's Own. The structure of the essay is suited for the stream of consciousness approach, and I often found myself flipping back a few pages just to figure out how the narrative had wound its way to the current point. This essay, published in 1929, was based on a series of lectures (or is it extended lectures?) that she delivered at two women's colleges in 1928. I can relate to this sequence, having written many TOA posts based on some remarks originally made around friends, family, or colleagues. There is something logical about treating spoken pieces as rough first drafts, particularly considering all the writing advice out there based on the unusual premise that writers, of all people, have an impossible time getting started - just write, baby!

Of course, although the lectures led to the book, I have no way of knowing if the lectures produced the work. It's entirely possible that at some point earlier in her life Woolf wrote about this topic until she inspired herself to speak in public; writing can change the way we live. I can also relate to this process, specifically in how writing on TOA has preceded a shift in the way I notice details about the world. The posts I've written about gender bias in the literary world, for example, may have influenced me when I noted the way Woolf describes how prevailing masculine values influenced the way her culture thought about literature. As Woolf notes, the critics have always been male, and they have reinforced these values, making books about war more culturally important than those about domestic work. This male, in his own little corner of the critical world, is delighted to state his certainty that this book is far more culturally important in 2021 than any book about those unspecified masculine values - my guesses are wars, sports, and being a business bro.

TOA Rating: Three extensions out of four.

the business bro's improv class

The most memorable improv show I've ever seen was my first. It happened sometime during my freshman year orientation weekend, inside the campus chapel. I don't recall a single word of the performance, but I'll never forget the structure of this one routine. The team performed its skit, then repeated the same scene, over and over, with one catch - each time, they halved the previous duration. In the final iteration, the team had one second for what was originally a two minute act, and they did all they could - the performance started and ended with everyone falling down onto the floor.

The gimmick had served its purpose. They got up and resumed the show, building on what worked to keep moving forward, but I'd already learned the lesson - given the right constraints, anyone can distill an idea, and distill it again. This kind of thinking is quite pervasive, and mostly for good reason - we are wasteful. There are always extra words, extra sounds, extra movements, but with a little prodding we can trim the excess until we are left with the message - stop, drop, and roll; spring forward, fall back; slow and steady wins the race.

I've been working on teaching this technique recently to one of our younger team members. I've found that his process is thorough to the point of distraction, which runs the risk of a peculiar form of paralysis - he routinely leaves a meeting with an impressive list of notes but is unable to use those to inform his next action. I've started asking him to state a summary of his work, then asking him to summarize his summary, then doing so again - three pages become a paragraph, a paragraph becomes a couple of sentences, the sentences become bulleted phrases. Over the past few months I feel like there has been some progress, and I expect this team member to build on his success over the rest of the year.

Like most business bros, I had a hunch my coaching would work, but for most of the journey I was flying blind. This is the essence of what we do - we try a few things and build on success. Like the way applause helps an improv team understand what works, it always helps us business bros to have outside reinforcement of our speculative efforts. A month ago during our division's monthly meeting, I thought I had my greatest reinforcement to date - our chief executive interrupted a short presentation by asking for a one-sentence summary of the preceding few slides. What a vindication of my methods! I smirked as the presenter struggled with the request, finally managing to squeeze his many ideas into a pair of complex, clumsy sentences.

I caught up with my team member a few hours later.

You see, I pointed out, we are not just working on this skill for its own sake. It's a high-level technique, relied on by the very person in charge of our division!

Ah, about that, came the reply. My dog was acting up, so I had to step away from the computer for a minute. I wanted to ask you if I'd missed anything...

Well. So it goes with coaching, I suppose - you draw up the right play, then the quarterback trips and falls. Still, the show goes on, so I nodded slowly to buy myself time. Yes, it was a good question - what had my team member missed while away from the computer? It seemed that I was the appropriate person to ask, having sat silently through the presentation except for that moment when I had chuckled my way through the two-sentence one-sentence summary. But for some reason, my mind had gone blank - I knew the gist but couldn't explain the details. I said I would get back to him.

I felt like someone who had realized Aesop's morals aren't a sufficient substitute for Aesop's Fables. Why is anything longer than it needs to be? I suppose that's the question we all need to answer. Yes, most things can be distilled into its message, but that means something must be lost in the process. I suspect the most likely candidate is the intangible factor, let's call it the essence, which often takes a backseat to the details. We know the hare lost, and from that fact we can learn something about racing, but what we really need to understand is why he took a nap, or why the tortoise kept going.

I think there was something missing in my well-intended coaching, which I perhaps overlooked from the arrogance of being ahead, and having a certain faith in my experience. I'd forgotten that since I already knew the stories, it sufficed to speak in morals. I was rudely reminded of my oversight when my moralizing exposed shortcomings in terms of retaining the new information from the unfamiliar presentation. I think I learned that there are some races which can only be lost, and that you cannot arrive anytime the journey has no destination. There are times where we learn more from reading than from the reading, just as sometimes we can see more on the trail than from the summit. 

If the story has a moral, then why write the story? If the presentation can be summarized in one sentence, then why prepare a presentation? If only a few words from the meeting mattered, then why have a meeting? I think everything about coaching starts and ends when we fall down, realizing that what used to work isn't going to work again, that the gimmick has served its purpose. Yes, the spirit is always good, but ideas always reach their logical conclusion. I think I'm ready to stand up again and start afresh with new questions, better questions - having distilled it to the basic message, what was the point of first having more than necessary? I'm back to it, back to winging it, back on my feet again to make it up as I go along, the lesson having finally sunk in after all these years.

reading review - idiot america

Quiz - by what year will there be 25 million climate refugees?

Idiot America by Charles Pierce (January 2021)

I first read this book in 2012, when I assume I regarded it as something along the lines of a clever tirade, like maybe a book-length version of Jimmy Kimmel's opening monologue. This reread felt a little different, more like that moment after the laughter when respite cedes the stage to reality; it was the same thing, but it was a different reading.

The premise of Idiot America should resonate with the average TOA reader - in this country, there is a stigma associated with intelligence. Pierce explores this idea throughout the book, bringing together American history, current events, and various anecdotes into a wide-ranging overview of the war against expertise. The fact of the book's publication in 2008 tempts me to suggest that it was something of a prophecy for the present, which has achieved at least one aspect of Pierce's vision - everyone and anyone is an expert, meaning no one is - but those with a fuller perspective will understand that this was always inevitable. I enjoyed this book, but as I alluded to above I would not go so far as to suggest it is enjoyable.

There is much more from my book notes that I would have once pointed out, but the good old days of extended reading reviews are long behind us. So, to the trivia question, which is perhaps appropriate to a theme in the book - America is a country that, as Pierce notes, is often entertained but rarely engaged, preferring information to knowledge, demonstrating the ethos of trivia. So, 25 million climate refugees. Did you guess a date in the future? I never had the pleasure of testing my knowledge, but I certainly wouldn't have said 1995. I did a little additional searching just now to see if I could cross-reference the fact. It seems to have come from British environmentalist Norman Meyers, whose methods have come under attack since he shared the figure. It's possible that the number is a little high, but I also know that Exxon-Mobil funded climate think tanks. The problem, I suppose, comes back to expertise, and the challenge of knowing whom to believe in a country whose greatest existential threat is its glorification of ignorance.

TOA Rating: Three conspiracy theories out of four.

reading review - the word pretty

I mentioned last week in this post that I had recently read Gabbert's essay collection. My previous thoughts loosely focused on the two essays I reread, "The Art of the Paragraph" and "Time, Money, Happiness", so let's finish up today with the insights from the rest of my reading, which I've captured in my book notes.

The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert (November 2020)

This collection of short essays captures Gabbert's thinking across a wide range of topics. There is no strict pattern to her writing, though each piece did reach certain checkpoints - an observation, a tangent, perhaps an unexpected insight or two, the writing guiding us to the end without ever quite revealing what was coming next. The work throughout The Word Pretty is a good example of how Gabbert describes one way to think of a paragraph - as mini-essays, where the writer can contain digressions while setting a foundation for the remainder of the essay. From my perspective, the way she linked these paragraphs together was the most interesting aspect of the collection, at least from the perspective of a writer.

This brings me to my overall thought about the work, which I consider to be the highest praise I can give after reading - it refueled my interest in writing. As you know, the post from earlier this month was based on the experience of rereading those above mentioned essays. It was also the case a couple of days ago that Gabbert's comment on optimized systems informed my essay about habits and efficiency. These pieces, which I first read in November, have lingered with me. I think the effect a book has on the reader, in terms of generating action, is given too little weight when assessing a work. I read this book and it led to some impetus, certain ideas or curiosity, which prompted me to try a thing or two on my own. I suspect a reader may have a similar reaction to The Word Pretty, even if it's just investigating more of Gabbert's work. It's bafflingly common that we evaluate certain things on their own merits, such as a piece of advice, without considering its effect on people. Is it better to give great advice that is ignored, or decent advice that leads to personal growth? In my mind, if the only result is that someone nods and thinks "OK, that sounds great" but it leads to no other action, well, then maybe we should redefine our idea of great.

TOA Rating: Three parentheses out of four.

breaking the efficiency habit

There is something missing in all the advice about breaking bad habits. Before I share my thoughts, let's all get on the same page via the following quick summary, which I pulled from the top search results for "how to break a habit":

• Healthline describes a framework invoking the three R's (reminder, routine, reward) before breaking up its advice into fifteen (15!) steps. My favorite step was "Ask why (focus on why you want to change)". Uh, maybe because it's not a good habit? Also, why are there fifteen steps?

• Harvard Business Review recommends that you "hack your mind using our methods", which includes "replacing the reward with curiosity"; reward your curiosity here. I guess this means if my bad habit involves carrot cake, I should wonder about what's in it instead of eating it? Though now that I think about it, is there carrot in carrot cake?

• Time is completely at sea, demonstrating a lack of basic understanding about habits in the thirty-one word opening paragraph - turning right instead of left isn't a habit, it's following directions, unless you wish to develop a habit of getting lost. The article's main tactic is to scold readers for their shortcomings - lower your stress level, develop your self-awareness, and set better goals; it's like diet advice reminding you that you're fat because you want to eat dessert (be curious instead!). My favorite recommendation was to have good habits ("replace a bad habit with a good one"). Thanks Time, thanks for the advice! But we clicked on the article because we have bad habits, one of which may include turning to you for advice.

• Lifehack opts for the philosopher's route, its first section being "How Habits Govern Your Life". I appreciate the mile-high view but, again, we are here because we already know how habits govern our lives - oppressively, like an unchecked tyrant; we are here for a revolution, not another lecture.

I must admit that despite my snarky remarks above, I actually agree with most of the thoughts in those articles. I simply find them, in the aggregate, pointless. Habits make the world go round, which makes breaking a habit a mammoth task, and not one made any easier for the fact of reading some internet columns. My complaint is the way those articles imply that the solution is somewhere after the hyperlink. TOA makes no such claims, about bad habits or otherwise - the balance of this post has no solutions for your bad habit (1).

I'd just like to point out that in my brief glance through those above links, I did not once come across any discussion of efficiency, and whether it played a role in the problem of bad habits. It's an odd omission because it seems that bad habits linger in our lives whenever they have a relatively low barrier to indulgence, whether that be in terms of time, money, or effort. Another way to say it is that bad habits linger if they have low cost, not in the sense of final damage but in terms of the initial price. This is a natural result of our tendency to improve through repetition, which means that habits become progressively easier to maintain as we increase our familiarity with a given task, process, or routine. The reward mechanism of this cycle is further reinforced by our cultish obsession with efficiency, which makes a hero out of anyone who can find the tiniest incremental gain in a seemingly optimized method. It's not simply the case that the reward is in the habit alone - there is also a reward in the process of developing the habit, and making it ever more efficient ahead of the next indulgence.

The end result is that a basic fact about a bad habit is often ignored - what we wish to change has been driven down to its lowest possible cost; change always comes at great cost. I remember how when I began cooking for myself it was easier to grill a steak than it was to roast a vegetable, so I regularly ate red meat whenever I prepared my own meals. For me, knowing the common advice wasn't enough - I knew why I wanted to change, I had the right level of curiosity, and I believe I possessed the necessary level of self-awareness, but my carnivorous habit nevertheless remained intact. The issue was that anytime I prepared a vegetable it came out worse than if I'd just left it raw, and I didn't find raw vegetables particularly appealing. The obstacle to change was that I was quite busy in those days, having found a job in a time when my peers didn't work, and I didn't have a pile of spare cash sitting around to purchase better cooking equipment. Each time I stepped into the kitchen, I faced the same decision - stick to what I knew, or start something new? Each time, I made the same choice. 

The situation was an understandable result of the conditions in my life at the time - I generally felt like my limited resources were under constant strain. I spent most of my first post-college year on a scavenger hunt for marginal gains - squeezing cents out of every dollar, shaving seconds off of every minute - and I was constantly drained from the endless hustling. Like I suspect is the case for most people, I relied on efficiency as the surest way to ease the pressure. There were so many facts about my life that became defined by efficiency - my commuting route, the way I used a computer, the day I chose for laundry - that I began to see myself as the central figure in a fully optimized, finely-tuned system. This meant the mere suggestion of a lifestyle change carried the threat of destabilizing the fragile structure; the best-case scenario would merely result in one optimization being exchanged for another, but no net gain for me.

I don't mean to suggest that I felt stuck or trapped in the situation. Likewise, I am not implying that my efficiencies added up to significance, as if I had somehow discovered the optimal allocation of my time, money, and effort. If there was a case for change, I had the capacity to consider it. It's simply that I had a difficult time imagining the benefit of reallocating my resources. Sure, I could spend a little more time on self-improvement, but wouldn't I lose an hour of sleep? I don't think it helped me at all during these deliberations that I understood how our society always reinforced the positives of efficiency. This meant that in addition to the measurable reward of my routines squeezing the most out of my resources, I also enjoyed the reward of being efficient for its own sake, like the fact of being efficient came with a trophy. It's true that when I wanted to start eating healthier by replacing red meat with vegetables, I didn't have the spare time, money, or energy for making the change. But it's also true that the way I cooked back then was efficient, and that making a change meant handing over that efficiency and all the positives I'd associated with the fact.

The theory of breaking a bad habit almost always trips over this hurdle of reality. When people reach for a late afternoon sweet that they don't want, it may indeed be the case that some complicated chain reaction happens in the brain, which is the contention of the common advice pieces. But I suspect that there is something else that requires deeper contemplation. Maybe that cookie is an admission of the deficit carried throughout the day - not enough sleep, not enough lunch, not enough joy on a mundane Monday. To me, the idea that a bad habit is something which can be isolated from the rest of life is entertaining but hardly plausible. The sense of absolute knowledge implied in the way flowchart-toting experts describe bad habits - feedback loops, dopamine hits, environmental cues - feels like an elaborate misdirection, similar to how politicians use a barrage of facts to disguise their lie. The truth is that in our relentless pursuit of efficiency we risk cutting certain corners, and a bad habit is often how the cost catches up to us (2). The truth is that if we have a bad habit, it may be the result of depriving ourselves elsewhere. The truth is that something is making it easy to keep up these bad habits.

The key to changing most bad habits, I think, is similar to the start of anything good - we must invest time, money, and effort into the task. This straightforward approach is rarely found in the advice columns for three reasons, the first two being very basic - it's not interesting, and it's not new. At some basic level we all know, and we've always known, that changing the future requires investment - and changing a bad habit means changing your future - but simply restating these facts doesn't make for interesting reading. The third reason is a little trickier - it's the problem of our collective regard for efficiency, which makes us recoil from the thought of anything that might waste our personal resources. There are many positive ways to describe investment, but efficiency is rarely among them. Investments are a messy process, often requiring a certain willingness to commit resources despite uncertainty; in some ways it's the opposite of efficiency, which seeks to maintain a known return for a lower resource cost.

It seems to me that one important step toward breaking our bad habits requires developing a healthy distrust of efficiency. This feels like a tall order, at least at the societal level. We are so enamored with efficiency that we marvel at those who make do with so little instead of questioning why some of our most ingenious and resourceful people remain stuck in poverty; we demand efficiency from our companies before they have started paying their workers living wages. We hold ourselves to the same sort of standard, running ourselves into the ground to ensure that no drop of ourselves goes wasted. It makes me question the high regard for efficiency in the first place, for it seems like it routinely hides the real problem just out of sight. It seems that efficiency is the lie we tell ourselves to feel better about leaving certain problems not just unresolved, but left in the realm of the impossible.

When there simply isn't enough to go around, nothing can go to waste. The efficiency cult has brainwashed us all into accepting the following - we have landed on the moon, we have COVID vaccines, we have so many billionaires that it's hard to keep track of them all, we have accomplished so much, but we simply cannot solve poverty by giving people the money, or solve homelessness by giving people the homes, or solve hunger by giving people the food. The fact of our efficiency is proof - if we had enough, then we could afford to be wasteful, but we worship at the altar of efficiency. It enables us to do more, get a little more accomplished, when we are at the limits, bursting at the seams, having accomplished so little. Efficiency is governing our lives like any bad habit, like an unchecked tyrant, who knows that the future won't change while he's in charge. It's easy for me to understand why people reach for that cookie. So go ahead, I guess, have another one, and I'll save the lecture for later. We are here for a revolution; it makes the world go round.

Footnotes

1) If you are still here, knowing full well that my posts contain no solutions, then I applaud your perseverance, and I thank you for your commitment. Or are you still here purely out of (bad) habit? In any event, thank you for reading.

2) I think this also happens at scale, such as when an efficient organization lowers its quality standard, or is forced into a series of layoffs; there seems to be little possibility of meaningful innovation within an efficient organization.

reading review - the visual display of quantitative information

Longtime readers may recall this farce of a post, which hinted at a crucial lesson from this book - good data visualization is based on just a few basic principles. My post from three years ago mentioned a basic rule of thumb for preferring charts to graphics. It also shared Tufte's concern regarding the problem of variation in the design instead of in the data. I returned to this book late in 2019 when I suspected that internalizing its lessons would prove hugely beneficial in my new role. 

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte (October 2019)

My book notes serve as a decent shortlist for good data visualization principles, but let's highlight a couple of the points I've found most helpful over the past eighteen months.

First, a good graphic encourages the eye to make data comparisons. Like with much of the advice in the book this sounds simple enough, but I often find myself failing to meet this standard. One obstacle is replication, in the sense that a graphic which was appropriate at one point in the past may lose its relevance over time as the underlying dataset changes. The solution is to make adjustments according to how the data changes, which is particularly challenging when the changes happen subtly over a prolonged period or there is significant pressure to present a consistent visual representation. However, without being open to change it becomes impossible to meet this particular standard. The best way to allow for eyeball comparisons is to use a visual that takes on the shape of the data - for example, by using a tall rather than wide graphic in the case of visualizing rapid growth. It's also advised to remain open to redundancy (that is, repeat data) if the duplication simplifies the eyeball comparison.

Another useful idea was to rely on labeling to defeat ambiguity, going so far as to write explanations on the graphic if necessary. This seems to run counter to another highly emphasized point in the book - maximize the data-to-ink ratio - but the extra investment is often worth the price if it reduces or eliminates ambiguity. As it relates to the question about ink, the best advice may be in the clarification of the above rule - add new ink if it presents new information.

The overall lesson in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is hard to pin down, but over a number of readings I gathered some basic concepts that came up time and again - simplicity, clarity, and common sense make up the critical foundation for any good visual. Does this rule out the value of knowing how to make an aesthetically impressive visual? There is always a time and place for adorning a graphic, but having the skill is no reason for using it. This works in some ways like knowing how to swim - it's indisputably a valuable ability, but in life it's generally easier to travel by land or air. The key is to have the confidence that when the data calls for complexity, you know how to do it. The rest of the time, it's best to understand the dataset first, then create a simple graphic that harnesses all of the insights mentioned in these reading reviews - show data (not design) variation, enable eyeball comparisons, and add ink to defeat ambiguity. Of course, let's not forget the most important rule of all - know when to use a chart instead.

TOA Rating: Three histograms out of four.

A parting thought - think of a graphic like a paragraph about the data.

reading review - rilke on love and other difficulties

This was the last book I remember reading in public before the pandemic shut us down - I sat in the Brookline OTTO and had a slice (maybe two) before riding the Green Line home. I don't think this experience had any effect on how I read this book, which is a short collection of Rilke's poetry and prose. 

Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties by Rainer Maria Rilke (February 2020)

The one piece I noted for rereading was "Blood Remembering", which if I recall correctly made a point that some experiences become so embedded into us that it's like the memory circulates forever in our bloodstream. Based on my notes, it seems to be a theme that comes up more than once in the collection. Rilke notes that with patience people can first forget, then welcome the return of memory in a different form; the memory that swims through our veins is the one that is ready to come forward in verse.

I read this book so long ago that I checked a few reviews to get a sense of the work. The common complaint seemed to center around the commentary provided by John J.L. Mood, who assembled the work. I gathered that the average reader would prefer Rilke without outside interference. The message is loud and clear; it is for the best, I think, not to add much more.

TOA Rating: Three editorials out of four

superpowers

I logged in a minute late and fell through the open icebreaker - what superpower would you like to have? One colleague mentioned invisibility, another suggested flying, though of course teleportation would be easier. Someone shared that seeing through walls was her preference. But would that mean you could see through everything? Chuckles all around, then the meeting began.

I never did share my response with the group, which I suppose was for the best. There is a problem with having a superpower - obligation. We put Superman on a pedestal without ever really discussing how difficult his life must be - with his gifts, ignoring the world's problems is never an option. I could not imagine my inbox if I were, say, capable of mind reading. Hey, could you schedule a meeting with Bobby and find out what he's thinking? By EOD? The thought alone would keep me up at night.

There is a flaw about my dread. I am already bombarded throughout the day with requests to share my modest skills with the team - a revised chart, a refreshed dataset, an insightful analysis. A new skill might change the nature of the requests, but as things stand I am in some ways already a superpower, possessing certain abilities that others can only wish to obtain for themselves. This is not a bragging session. I ask the same of others around me, in reverential awe of their strengths, signing my name meekly at the bottom of each email with the hope that I, too, can temporarily benefit from their superpowers.

But this is not the nature of the question. All things considered, I suppose the best option would be something that I could keep all to myself. I decided one restless night that the best choice would be to have full control over falling asleep. Imagine being able to think "time for sleep", then going down cold for eight perfect hours? No more tossing and turning, no more thinking about tomorrow's inbox, no more 3AM reading sessions, just a few hours of rest so that I could awake in the morning, energized and refreshed, ready to share my gifts again with the world.

luxury tax

Later this month I plan to post a reading review of Elisa Gabbert's The Word Pretty, an acclaimed 2018 essay collection. The two essays I reread, "The Art of the Paragraph" and "Time, Money, Happiness", were previously posted online (as I assume is the case for a majority of the pieces). This is great news, dear reader, because it gives you the option of following the links above and reaching your own conclusions as you read each essay. It's also quite the luxury from my point of view - most of the time my reading reviews are about books that no one else has read, but in this case I have an opportunity to write about essays that my readers can choose to experience in the same way as me.

In the spirit of this opportunity, I took a few moments just now to reread those essays. There is a problem. The online reading experience, I've discovered, is much different from my experience reading these essays out of a slim paperback while sitting alongside the Charles River. I could blame the specific problem on a number of minor issues - the formatting, for example, squeezed the text into the middle third of the webpage, necessitating constant action on my part to keep scrolling into unread territory. I could also blame the familiar low-grade internet anxiety that comes from being focused on one link for more than a minute or two, knowing all the while that potentially more interesting options were just a click away. But these are trivial matters - they make up the cost of doing business via the internet, where everything is free if you can stay focused. The problem I discovered has to do with the pair of images, one in each essay, which broke up the writing. In my eyes, these small interruptions diminished the essays in comparison to the versions I read from the paperback.

In the first essay, the interruption is a paragraph-sized fleuron, followed by the caption: "A fleuron, a typographic marker sometimes used as an inline paragraph break"; I guess the other times it's used as a paragraph-sized image. It strikes me that a better way to communicate the idea might have been to actually use the fleuron as an inline paragraph break, for which there are several opportunities throughout the essay, but those who've read the essay will know why this wouldn't work. Early on, Gabbert notes her obsession with "invisible transitions"; she later adds that "it’s in the essays that don’t use section signs that I appreciate the transitions most". The reason Gabbert would prefer to omit the fleuron in this particular work is evident to anyone who read the work; I'm getting the impression that maybe this image appearing in the middle of the essay wasn't the author's idea.

The image in the second essay was far less confusing - the thoughtfully edited Monopoly board ties back to the first idea in the work, which Gabbert traces through the opening paragraphs. As it relates to the idea of the image being relevant within the work, this example passes the test. The problem was the timing - at the point where the Luxury Tax image fills the screen, the essay has subtly drifted away from the initial thought about money, instead refocusing on its relationship to time ("time has become expensive"). By the time we reach the end of the essay, it's clear at best that the image is more of an improvised aside rather than part of the script; at worst it feels like an unfortunate distraction, conspiring against any reader who started the essay with the anticipation of discovery.

This problem may very well be mine and mine alone. It may be different for you, reader, as you encounter these essays for the first time. I have come to these works from a different perspective - the ancient land of books, where images stay on the cover and each fleuron is the right size, mite-sized. There are no tour guides strolling the boardwalk, distracting me with their uninvited references to cultural relics. When I read these essays, I did so with the goal of seeing the world through the writer's eyes, and participating in the process of making new connections. I discovered that a fork helps bounce ideas around a table with the same joyful spontaneity once generated by a paddle, and realized that seeing the invisible is less fun when the hidden is brought into plain sight. I feel like the lottery winner holding the big check in front of the cameras, with the jackpot yet unadjusted for those inevitable taxes - I'm still happy about this prize, these links to the essays I enjoyed from my reading, but it's not quite as good as I'd hoped.

this week in TOA

Two of this week's emails went out later than expected, so here's a quick roundup of what you (may) have missed:

Tuesday - Three rants about books

Thursday - A rant about some potentially life-saving advice

Friday - A rant about censorship in the internet age

Now, back to this email problem. I'm generally happy to write off one incident as bad luck, but two issues in one week requires an intervention. I think the email feature checks each morning for a new post, then sends anything that wasn't previously sent, so I can either delay the check or post earlier in the morning. I'm happy with the timing of the email (when it works) so I'll start by moving the posting time up a few hours and see if it does the trick.

This solution creates an interesting opportunity for you night owls - when that clock strikes midnight, you'll know you might be just minutes away from a new TOA post! Is it worth checking? I say no, TOA is hardly the cure for insomnia, in fact it may be the exact opposite, so the official recommendation is to wait until morning for the email. But who am I to withhold information? I am just letting you know, dear reader, that this is an option.

censoring experts

There is something like a conversation going on at the moment - or perhaps, as usual, I've only just noticed the eternal chatter - anyway, there is talk about censorship, specifically as it relates to online platforms. Before I get into the details of any specific situation, I'll share that I am bothered, in general, by the idea of censorship, the idea that free expression can be filtered, suppressed, or deleted by a controlling body.

The tricky part is when reputation changes the message. My blanket recommendation is to listen to a doctor's medical advice, but that doesn't cover the possibility of a doctor speaking outside his or her area of expertise. There is something to be said for how a doctor will have broader general knowledge about medicine than the average person, but there are areas of medicine that remain almost entirely unknown even to doctors. When a doctor speaks knowledgably about these unknown topics, then adds the glossy seal of approval - "by the way, this is coming from a doctor" - it forces me to think a little differently regarding my ideas about censorship.

Does this mean that I feel a doctor should only be allowed to speak in the language of proven science? I think what I mean is that when someone in a position of power knows that his or her authority may reinforce speculation, then that person should remind us of the possibility. Prefacing speculation with phrases like "Ignore the fact that I am a doctor for a minute, but I suspect..." may not solve all our problems - there is always someone out there who will believe the remotest of hypotheses - but it should help us see the line between what requires censorship and what should merely be taken with a little extra salt.

leftovers - life hacks (PSAs, plus the ones you don't need)

My initial comments on Life Hacks (two separate posts, one in February and the other in March) skipped over a couple of notes. I want to mention them today because of their potential life-saving value; these are more like PSAs than hacks. To help us get through them as fast as possible, I've rearranged them into a semi-continuous thought:

Remember that saliva follows gravity, especially when an avalanche leaves you unsure of which way is up... same for bubbles underwater... saliva can also remove tape that is over your mouth... you buy time if you pull your shirt over your face before being buried alive... play dead with brown bears, but punch black bears in the nose... lie on your back when sinking in quicksand...

I'd suggest checking those out before accepting them as fact, however - the quicksand note in particular looks a little suspicious. 

There were a couple of hacks that left me wondering why I hadn't bothered to think of them myself. One example was the suggestion to use ground coffee for liquid cleanup, including vomit. I used to notice how the custodial staff in school deployed sawdust for similar tasks, so this one partially reflects my lack of curiosity in terms of understanding the basics about common solutions. Determined not to make the same mistake again, I looked into the use of ground coffee in general. It turns out that there are quite a few recommendations out there - ground coffee as fertilizer, ground coffee as insect repellant, ground coffee as skin treatment. I'm not sure about any of those other ideas, but I'm willing to try a couple out for myself if I'm in a situation where I've exhausted all other ideas. I will keep you posted.

The other example was a note that the lines on a Solo cup correspond to serving sizes of various alcoholic drinks. I've likely used these cups over several thousand occasions so it struck me as a little odd that I'd never noticed the fact, but it turns out that this fact isn't strictly true - even PolitiFact weighed in to debunk the idea that this was built into the design. So is it false? Not necessarily, the lines are pretty close, regardless of the original intent; let's agree that it's true on average (!). In any event, this hack is the essence of the entire book, focusing on functionality in the present-day ahead of considerations related to the original blueprint.

reading clearout - april 2021

Hi,

Some reading thoughts that don't merit a full review.

The New New Thing by Michael Lewis (December 2020)

My favorite Michael Lewis book, which is saying something given all his other work. This 1999 release isn't routinely included among his classics, and perhaps this explains why his subject, Jim Clark, remains somewhat unknown today. So who is this guy? You may wish to Google him, informed reader, but be warned - despite founding three-separate billion dollar companies IN SILICON VALLEY, Clark is somehow the second search result, pipped to the checkered flag by a Formula One driver. I suppose it's just another detail to add to the long list compiled in The New New Thing, which is pure Lewis throughout - his trademark "can you believe how ridiculous this is?" incredulity is the rail running beneath the work, and along the way we learn a few things about a quirky moment in the early days of the internet boom.

Book notes are here.

Thirty-One Nil by James Montague (March 2021)

Montague hopscotches his way through the qualification process for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in this wide-ranging book. Each chapter focuses on a different match, starting in Tajikistan with Afghanistan's "home" match against Palestine and building up to the highest profile matchday in the tournament, Europe's final playoff round. I suspect I enjoyed the style more than the average reader, as Montague's travel itinerary bore some resemblance to the way I've navigated Wikipedia's article about the qualification process; certain readers may prefer the traditional style of one journalist covering an entire team's journey. This is the only complaint I could invent for an otherwise remarkable book, and I look forward to rereading it ahead of next year's tournament finals.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami (January 2020)

Longtime TOA readers are surely exhausted of hearing about this work, which I've mentioned on thirteen prior occasions, so I'll spare you the extended analysis; my recent observations are in these book notes.

I've written before about the way Murakami creates a specific mood in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, which I notice on certain winter days when the sun goes down a little too soon, a little too fast, like it's taking the future with it as it dives out of sight; this feeling was evident again in last year's rereading. I also left that reading experience with a new question - where is the line between what we lack and what we do not appreciate? Can we find what we need by seeing the existing in a new light? To restate the thought in terms of the walls that play a constant thematic role in this book - at what point do we stop looking out, opting instead to look inward and fill in our missing spaces? Murakami's other books are rightfully acclaimed and Hard-Boiled Wonderland is missing some of the features that built his international popularity, but for me this book will likely remain my favorite of his work.

the business bro explains the logic

It's logical that if a sport suffers from low ratings, additional broadcasts of said sport will pull in low ratings. It's also logical that stubbornly airing additional broadcasts of the sport, over and over, will do little to change the reality of those low ratings. It's logical, but not obvious. I cite as evidence the history of The Contender, a reality show that my friend once described as being "about a tournament where the winners fight each other, which is just boxing" (1). The problem with the show was that its focus on the reality TV aspect prevented it from realizing that it was just boxing, a concern it exacerbated by relying on promising but relatively unknown athletes rather than creating a show which featured its most recognizable stars. After all, if ratings for boxing were low when the fights featured the best in the business, how would airing additional fights with less talented boxers increase viewership? It wouldn't, and it didn't. In hindsight, the reality TV aspects of the show became a convenient scapegoat for its failure, taking the blame for low ratings that were always better explained by the reality of boxing on TV (2). 

There is a broader lesson in how misunderstanding the cause of low ratings prevented the business bros in charge from making improvements to the program. The story of The Contender reminds us that this form of blindness - which prevents us from seeing the forest for the trees - is all too common when we try to diagnose the primary cause at the root of the issue. It's similar to a story I shared two months ago about a former boss and his doomed bonus scheme - the math suggested that the additional time required to earn the bonus reduced overall hourly pay rates, implying that the bonus plan was in fact a poorly disguised pay cut. The problem could have been resolved with a better bonus (or, I suppose, by giving the staff an official pay cut, such that the math would suggest pursuing the bonus was profitable).

The biggest universal challenge facing most of us aspiring business bros involves finding the line between the relevance of the moment's details and the eternal truth that almost always sweeps such details away; it's like knowing when to run back into the burning building instead of remaining safely on the sidewalk. One way to illustrate the ubiquity of this task is to look at organizational truisms. The common business bro leans on these truisms to explain away what could otherwise serve as a critical alarm for the organization, but in some cases the truism must be set aside in order to properly recognize the root cause of a particular problem. It's a critical skill, which enables us to see what should have been obvious all along - no one watches boxing, even if the reality TV aspects bring an intriguing twist; no one likes a pay cut, even though most broadly agree that they like bonuses.

The first truism that comes to mind is the Peter principle, which states that in hierarchies employees rise to their level of incompetence; Peter's Corollary adds that the logical outcome for any position in a hierarchy is an incompetent employee. The stunning mechanism is based on the observation that promotions for good performance have no direct connection to success in the next role, seeing as how skills from a lower level are never certain to translate to a higher position. Thus, the conclusion is that an employee rising to a new position will either succeed and be promoted again, or struggle and stagnate at the new level. The business bro who looks at this mechanism may conclude that the situation is hopeless - there are no good reasons to promote someone except for good performance, but firing incompetent people seems like a good way to hurt morale while also dismissing someone who was valuable in a different position. The Peter principle offers an easy escape from the responsibility of resolving the issue - oh, what choice did I have, I had to promote him! And I can't be expected to fire him now, right?

There are two things that come to mind when I think logically about the Peter principle - training and structure. First, does the organization train promoted employees with the same commitment they demonstrate toward a new hire? From my experience, I'd say it's rare for an organization to even recognize the value of training a promoted employee, and my sense is that the promotion from "individual" to "manager" is treated with the barest indifference; I've seen CVS customers receive better training at the self-checkout kiosk than I have seen newly promoted colleagues receive useful managerial training. If entry-level employees are succeeding at rates much higher than promoted employees, perhaps the relevant issue is about training rather than the self-fulfilling prophesies glittering in Peter's crystal ball. But what if the lack of training isn't a relevant concern? This leads me to my second point, which is that the business bro may then wish to consider the hierarchy and assess its functional value. Does the hierarchy improve communication and decision-making, or does it exist merely to allow for promotions as a manner to acknowledge success? Rather than relying on promotions to recognize success, could a compensation scheme tied to the organization's performance be used instead? This would keep employees where they are competent while also enabling the organization to properly reward and acknowledge success. The Peter principle to me seems like an excuse for ignoring two more common issues - the failure of the organization to train promoted staff and the reliance on hierarchy as a way to recognize success.

The second truism is Parkinson's law, which suggests that busywork expands to fill the time allotted for the work. I’m sure anyone can relate to this concept, whether it be in the workplace or elsewhere, though of course it's commonly used to explain the way bureaucracy gradually overwhelms an organization. The suggested remedies to this phenomenon are so void of imagination that I wonder if they are in themselves results of the very busywork to which they state their objection. "If someone takes three hours, give them two" sounds like a decent solution, but it's destined to end with a spectacular double whammy - a missed deadline, closely followed by the particular form of shoddy work that only results from panicked rushing. I struggled a little bit to envision an acceptable remedy for Parkinson's law, then it came to me - the solution is to find interesting work, such that the busywork is no longer necessary; if the busywork is necessary, find new employees who will find it interesting.

I know this solution must be true because I've experienced the same challenge today with writing - having had nothing to write about, I've found something here that resembles busywork, then allowed it to fill up all the space thus far consumed by this essay. The sooner I end this, the better, but lacking as I am at the moment in terms of good ideas, I feel compelled to carry on rather than face the reality. The solution isn't to convince myself to stop, or to work within an invented time constraint, or to write faster - the solution is to find a new topic that contextualizes this subject as busywork, which will enable me to leave it alone without guilt as I explore a new project. I think this is the solution we all know, but prefer to leave unsaid, opting instead to invent wide-ranging explanations of unstoppable phenomena that create so many problems in our lives, problems over which we claim no agency. These explanations make us feel better, but they rob us of the opportunity to reach our potential. When we encounter a bad TV show, an exploitative boss, an organization that refuses to train, the solution is simple - find something better and move on. When we find ourselves mired into the twisted logic of our own busywork, we must stop for a moment until the picture becomes clear - if busywork expands to fill the time allotted to it, and we allot all of our lives to busywork, well, you don't need me to explain the logic of rising to your own level of incompetence.

Footnotes

1) My friend's capacity for these concise summaries was famous in our group - we used to refer to them as "___'s logical explanations". I didn't realize that these explanations, which we mostly treated as comic relief, were also examples of highly advanced critical thinking about the BS in daily life.

2) I assume they thought the show was like American Idol for boxing, but the process of an audience voting for singers based on short performances has no equivalent in the music industry, which gave Fox's hit program a necessary novelty factor that undoubtedly contributed to its success.

toa rewind - the toa asian supremacy test (march 2019)

I was rereading this post from two years ago, in which I posed a quiz question - how many great American leaders can you name in one minute? Actually, we can just try it again now, right?

OK... start!

(Waiting...)

(... a little longer...)

(...time!)

Of course, the real quiz starts now - did your list align to this country's racial and gender demographics? I didn't say it two years ago, but I'll say it now - I bet you named a lot of white men.

The smug conclusion obscures an important nuance - the test in reverse may have led to the same result. In fact, the proportion of white men on the list of America's worst leaders might be higher than the proportion of them on the list of great leaders. I don't know what to make of this presumed fact, but I'll try - if it's true that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, then I suppose it means those who never miss aren't getting any shots.

the toa newsletter, april 2021

Hi reader,

Happy April! As is standard operating procedure these days, I have exactly zero news for you all, not even a note or two about a vaccine. This is all well and good, I think, because who would believe anything I say on April Fool's Day, anyway? You have to agree with me on the point, I think, because if you don't then it means you just proved my point... let's move on.

I consider April Fool's Day the most holy of minor holidays, but I don't celebrate in the traditional manner of pulling pranks. I don't have anything against pranks, I'm just not big into them. The only one I can remember came ten years ago today, when I wrote "April Fools" on the bottom of an empty munchkin box and left it next to the office refrigerator. I recall a couple of strangled cries echoing through the office during the morning, which was plenty of reward for me, but it was an otherwise forgettable day.

The real story is how I got the box. I did not plan ahead in any meaningful way for the prank, so on the fateful morning I made a stop at Dunkin' Donuts (it wasn't always called Dunkin', kids). I got to the front of the line and asked for an empty munchkin box, a request that generated so much confusion I soon found myself speaking with a second employee, then the manager. They simply didn't understand why I would want just the box. I was halfway into my third attempt at explaining the request when I realized that I should have just ordered the munchkins like any sane person, then removed the contents later to enable the prank. This is the problem with April Fool's Day - no matter what you say, no one believes you.