(First: yes, I've read the Paradox of Choice.)
There's just so much. Not saying it's too much, because how much beauty is too much, but so much. Songs, books, movies, games, puzzles, paintings, food, blogs, forums, websites, shows, plays, ideas, experiments, debates, sports, travel, technology, journalism, history, science, meditation, math, architecture, language, dance, nature, relationships, love, pain, joy, sorrow, birth, rebirth, death, sunrises, sunsets. Whatever our human race still lacks...do we lack contentment, yes, but do we lack content, holy god no.
And it's easy as breathing to find yourself wishing for a thousand hours in a day for a thousand years to take it all in, even figure out *how* to take it in. And even that wouldn't be enough time. Not even close. Start a bucket list and the bucket grows to see you at eye level like a large-breed dog you've heard *probably* won't bite you but still...and then the bucket is twice your height, ten times your height; twenty, thirty. Any decision you make is arbitrary, and any wasted moment spent in stillness, spent not taking something, anything in, feels like blasphemy.
A few rare, blessed and well-dressed individuals can swim in this current and not be rushed, but most of us cannot. Most of us will go where the tide takes us, kicking and screaming on occasion when we briefly become aware of how utterly little control we have and, even if we had that control, how enduringly ignorant we are of what we really want or need. We're served a thing by life that smells like some vegetable we hated as children and we reject the thing by instinct, but if not that, then...what? And why? Shoot, half the stuff I've wished for over the years would have been disastrous had the wish come true.
It's okay, man, don't take it so serious, they say. They are right. You won't get to lots of stuff. I love to learn words. No, I don't know why. I might finish learning the nine-letter Scrabble-acceptable words someday. I might even learn the tens, if I am old and the hamster in my mind wants that wheel. The elevens, dubious, the twelves, hopeless without cutting across the infield. You may ask what the point is, but I, in turn, would ask you why you expect there would be a point. Shah mat. Life's anxieties stack up. We do what gets us through the night. We climb those mountains it feels impossible not to climb. No, it doesn't "matter"; that's ridiculous. Any mountain worthy of the name is not stirred for a moment from its sleep by your tickling ascent of it. But maybe you will be.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Flashback: November 30, 2010 - Wherein I Drink Bad Beer So You Don't Have To
(originally posted on my LJ Scrabble blog at the time)
So I felt like getting some beer after work. Self-actualization can wait a day. But hey, let's learn something. I ordinarily don't drink crappy domestic beers of the sort hawked by pretty girls every five minutes during NFL games on TV, but I have never tried a beer with 55 calories before and I'm trying to shed some weight. So here it is, a sixer of Budweiser Select 55. (For non-beer drinkers, the scoop: a regular beer is about 150 calories per 12-ounce bottle, a standard light beer is 90-100. 55 is ridiculous.)
I'm midway through the six as I type. This beer does not taste bad or good, just really weak. It's like someone took a bottle of Bud Light, turned down its nasty creamy aftertaste (thanks for that) and poured it into a bottle of Perrier. And it has 2.4% alcohol, which is awfully wimpy. We'll see how that scales in about 45 minutes.
The calorie-to-buzz ratio is the point of interest. Calorically, six of these wussy things equals 2.2 normal beers. If six of these, just 330 calories, get me as buzzed as 3 or 4 normal beers, which is to say not really but it's a good start, I'm ahead on the deal. But that's before accounting for the fact that the beer makes Swiss cheese seem as spicy as kimchi by comparison, or that it seems to have diuretic qualities even beyond normal beer.
Some minutes later...verdict: no. Go for a quality light beer instead. Which was my hypothesis before I started, but the work of science is often mundane and true revelation is rare.
So I felt like getting some beer after work. Self-actualization can wait a day. But hey, let's learn something. I ordinarily don't drink crappy domestic beers of the sort hawked by pretty girls every five minutes during NFL games on TV, but I have never tried a beer with 55 calories before and I'm trying to shed some weight. So here it is, a sixer of Budweiser Select 55. (For non-beer drinkers, the scoop: a regular beer is about 150 calories per 12-ounce bottle, a standard light beer is 90-100. 55 is ridiculous.)
I'm midway through the six as I type. This beer does not taste bad or good, just really weak. It's like someone took a bottle of Bud Light, turned down its nasty creamy aftertaste (thanks for that) and poured it into a bottle of Perrier. And it has 2.4% alcohol, which is awfully wimpy. We'll see how that scales in about 45 minutes.
The calorie-to-buzz ratio is the point of interest. Calorically, six of these wussy things equals 2.2 normal beers. If six of these, just 330 calories, get me as buzzed as 3 or 4 normal beers, which is to say not really but it's a good start, I'm ahead on the deal. But that's before accounting for the fact that the beer makes Swiss cheese seem as spicy as kimchi by comparison, or that it seems to have diuretic qualities even beyond normal beer.
Some minutes later...verdict: no. Go for a quality light beer instead. Which was my hypothesis before I started, but the work of science is often mundane and true revelation is rare.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Amnesty
Think of all the people you’d say you know. Not just the ones you live with or talk to every day - everybody, no matter how well you know them or whether you like them or not. What percentage would you say you’ve had substantial interaction with in the past three to six months? By “substantial” here, I mean an exchange that displays or reveals people’s personal qualities: that is, not just small talk. I would guess that percentage isn’t very high for most people. There are a great many people I haven’t really hung out with or talked to much in two, five, ten, even fifteen years or more, and if I were asked whether I knew them personally I would still say yes. And with the rise of social networking, it’s even more true now.
What this means is that the conceptions we walk around with about a great many people we know - the majority - are seriously out of date. While I think it’s probably true that most of our basic personality doesn’t change too much throughout life, there are just so many roads we travel, in our lives and in our minds. Thousands upon thousands of changes big and small conspire to shape what we are right now. Some are visible to the outside world, but many we keep to ourselves or only reveal to our closest fellow travelers.
And these changes, even profound ones, can occur very quickly sometimes. You meet a stranger and one thing leads to another and you’re never the same. You buy a house, get a pet, become a parent. You read a book or see a movie or experience art that changes how you think and feel. You discover a new pursuit that really drives you and becomes central to your life. You get rich; you get poor. You travel the country or the world, which cannot help but give you a perspective you didn’t have before. You develop a new far-reaching habit, either a good one or a bad one. You get sick, or narrowly escape death, or something distressing happens to a loved one. You get therapy, or you come to need it and can’t or don’t treat the problem. You take up a religion, or leave one behind. You change careers, maybe multiple times. You do something wonderful and the afterglow stays with you for a long time, or you do something terrible and the guilt clings to you just as tightly. You fall in love, fall out of love, gain a friend, lose a friend, make an enemy, make peace; you witness births and you witness deaths. These and many others like them, big and small, assemble us piece by piece. Everyone is a work in progress.
What I take from this is the folly of making assumptions about people based on out-of-date information - the folly of holding grudges. There are just too many variables. People’s lives and attitudes and desires can change so much, so quickly, and even most who know them won’t realize it. As with many other things I write about, this is a lesson I would have done well to learn long ago and should seek to learn much better now. I certainly wouldn’t want others to form their opinions of me on the basis of an exchange from five or ten or twenty years ago - even an image formed a year or two ago might well be wildly inaccurate today - and I shouldn’t form my opinions of others that way either.
If I renounce sizing up others that way, then the next step must be wiping the slate clean of all those outdated resentments and grievances. If the John Doe of ten years ago rubbed me wrong, it doesn’t mean the John Doe of today would. I may not choose to spend any time to find out what he’s up to now, and there’s no law that I have to like everyone or that everyone has to like me, but at least I can learn to free myself from continuing to resent him.
I’ve made this mistake countless times. I don’t want to make it anymore, though I’m sure I will. So I’ll start my effort right now: I hold nothing against anyone.
What this means is that the conceptions we walk around with about a great many people we know - the majority - are seriously out of date. While I think it’s probably true that most of our basic personality doesn’t change too much throughout life, there are just so many roads we travel, in our lives and in our minds. Thousands upon thousands of changes big and small conspire to shape what we are right now. Some are visible to the outside world, but many we keep to ourselves or only reveal to our closest fellow travelers.
And these changes, even profound ones, can occur very quickly sometimes. You meet a stranger and one thing leads to another and you’re never the same. You buy a house, get a pet, become a parent. You read a book or see a movie or experience art that changes how you think and feel. You discover a new pursuit that really drives you and becomes central to your life. You get rich; you get poor. You travel the country or the world, which cannot help but give you a perspective you didn’t have before. You develop a new far-reaching habit, either a good one or a bad one. You get sick, or narrowly escape death, or something distressing happens to a loved one. You get therapy, or you come to need it and can’t or don’t treat the problem. You take up a religion, or leave one behind. You change careers, maybe multiple times. You do something wonderful and the afterglow stays with you for a long time, or you do something terrible and the guilt clings to you just as tightly. You fall in love, fall out of love, gain a friend, lose a friend, make an enemy, make peace; you witness births and you witness deaths. These and many others like them, big and small, assemble us piece by piece. Everyone is a work in progress.
What I take from this is the folly of making assumptions about people based on out-of-date information - the folly of holding grudges. There are just too many variables. People’s lives and attitudes and desires can change so much, so quickly, and even most who know them won’t realize it. As with many other things I write about, this is a lesson I would have done well to learn long ago and should seek to learn much better now. I certainly wouldn’t want others to form their opinions of me on the basis of an exchange from five or ten or twenty years ago - even an image formed a year or two ago might well be wildly inaccurate today - and I shouldn’t form my opinions of others that way either.
If I renounce sizing up others that way, then the next step must be wiping the slate clean of all those outdated resentments and grievances. If the John Doe of ten years ago rubbed me wrong, it doesn’t mean the John Doe of today would. I may not choose to spend any time to find out what he’s up to now, and there’s no law that I have to like everyone or that everyone has to like me, but at least I can learn to free myself from continuing to resent him.
I’ve made this mistake countless times. I don’t want to make it anymore, though I’m sure I will. So I’ll start my effort right now: I hold nothing against anyone.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
By special request, Ram It Down
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtu20Ejv3SI
The title of Judas Priest's 1988 release achieves a singular, overarching clarity perhaps unequaled by any other rock album title. "Ram It Down" captures in just three words the entirety, every part and the whole, of the band circa 1988 and its music. The three words *are* the album and *are* the band as it existed at the time. This obviates the need to even hear the album or have seen the band on that year's tour; it is only necessary to know that Judas Priest made an album called Ram It Down in 1988. And unlike with any other band and its album, that fact can be known a priori. I mean, what else could that collection of music be named, and who else both could and would have made it?
Readers here may recall that I have talked in other contexts about the idea of rerunning a person's life as a simulation with millions of iterations. Parallel universes, Markov chains, that sort of thing. No matter what parameters one could possibly set for such an exercise, it is clear that Judas Priest, with that exact lineup of members, would have made an album called Ram It Down in 1988 in every single one of them. Just try to conceive of a world where that didn't happen, and you'll quickly see that you cannot. Philosophers talk about free will, but in this case the band had not only no choice, but no decision to make - had they not recorded Ram It Down in 1988, it would have constituted a contradiction of the nature of their existence across every theoretically definable universe, a cosmic fabric-rending eternal separation between "is" and "does", the uprooting of the very idea of definition itself. There is no such thing as a Judas Priest that does not ram it down, given any nonzero quantity of it, the existence of any means of ramming, and downward space relative to any conceivable perspective in any conceivable universe. It is at its heart the same question as the age-old one about whether an all-powerful god can build a rock so large that he cannot lift it, or shall we say, use His Fist to ram it downward as the cover art depicts.
What does this mean for us as listeners? It means that Judas Priest in 1988 - unconsciously, remember - managed to do away with the chasm that separates art from artist, not by building a bridge between the two, but by forcibly merging the two banks of the river into one in Mind. This is alluded to in the opening couplet of the third song, "Love Zone": "Been awake all night, can't get no sleep/I need a steel blue heart walkin' down the street". This signifies not merely the desire for a fundamental change in the nature of matter and its attributes - steel blue hearts, wherever they might exist, do not now possess the capability of walking down streets - but the presence of both the volition (awake all night by choice: there's Great Work to be done!) and the power to define a heretofore undefined zone where that change is made real. And the listener then represents a coplanar third instance: we do not travel *to* the love zone (nach Hause), but rather are already by definition localized *in* that zone (zu Hause). Even when - nay, especially when - you and your friend Dean are playing the drinking game of trying to read the lyrics aloud without laughing. Trust me, it's not easy.
Also worth noting: the album came out in 1988. The year divided by 4 (the number of the great cross) is 497. The running time of the album is 49 minutes and 32 seconds, and the leader length on a standard cassette is perhaps five seconds at each end, bringing the total click-to-click time to 49:42 - exactly one-tenth of 497. The year is thus divided into forty (forty days, forty nights; Wild Nights, Hot and Crazy Days had appeared two years earlier.)
Some may focus on the "it" in Ram It Down, the object. Is it a possession, an abstract quality - or rather, is "ram it" being used as an indivisible phrasal verb? That last theory might easily be dismissed, except for this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOYY6futWBc
But I think the simpler theory is the sounder one: Watch the JP video "Hot Rockin' " from seven years before and I trust you'll see what I mean without me having to explain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki3TpFZY7cU
What you just saw is the "it". Not any one element in the video, but rather the essence, its DNA if you will, its many fractions reduced as far as they can be. The concepts "ram", "it" and "down" (Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos; yin, yang, velocity/orientation/event space) are everywhere present and already have their permanent angular relationship to each other. I think you'll agree that IT could have been no other way.
Eh, Ram It Down mostly sucks by Priest standards. Blood Red Skies and the title track are okay. And Johnny B. Goode, WTF?
The title of Judas Priest's 1988 release achieves a singular, overarching clarity perhaps unequaled by any other rock album title. "Ram It Down" captures in just three words the entirety, every part and the whole, of the band circa 1988 and its music. The three words *are* the album and *are* the band as it existed at the time. This obviates the need to even hear the album or have seen the band on that year's tour; it is only necessary to know that Judas Priest made an album called Ram It Down in 1988. And unlike with any other band and its album, that fact can be known a priori. I mean, what else could that collection of music be named, and who else both could and would have made it?
Readers here may recall that I have talked in other contexts about the idea of rerunning a person's life as a simulation with millions of iterations. Parallel universes, Markov chains, that sort of thing. No matter what parameters one could possibly set for such an exercise, it is clear that Judas Priest, with that exact lineup of members, would have made an album called Ram It Down in 1988 in every single one of them. Just try to conceive of a world where that didn't happen, and you'll quickly see that you cannot. Philosophers talk about free will, but in this case the band had not only no choice, but no decision to make - had they not recorded Ram It Down in 1988, it would have constituted a contradiction of the nature of their existence across every theoretically definable universe, a cosmic fabric-rending eternal separation between "is" and "does", the uprooting of the very idea of definition itself. There is no such thing as a Judas Priest that does not ram it down, given any nonzero quantity of it, the existence of any means of ramming, and downward space relative to any conceivable perspective in any conceivable universe. It is at its heart the same question as the age-old one about whether an all-powerful god can build a rock so large that he cannot lift it, or shall we say, use His Fist to ram it downward as the cover art depicts.
What does this mean for us as listeners? It means that Judas Priest in 1988 - unconsciously, remember - managed to do away with the chasm that separates art from artist, not by building a bridge between the two, but by forcibly merging the two banks of the river into one in Mind. This is alluded to in the opening couplet of the third song, "Love Zone": "Been awake all night, can't get no sleep/I need a steel blue heart walkin' down the street". This signifies not merely the desire for a fundamental change in the nature of matter and its attributes - steel blue hearts, wherever they might exist, do not now possess the capability of walking down streets - but the presence of both the volition (awake all night by choice: there's Great Work to be done!) and the power to define a heretofore undefined zone where that change is made real. And the listener then represents a coplanar third instance: we do not travel *to* the love zone (nach Hause), but rather are already by definition localized *in* that zone (zu Hause). Even when - nay, especially when - you and your friend Dean are playing the drinking game of trying to read the lyrics aloud without laughing. Trust me, it's not easy.
Also worth noting: the album came out in 1988. The year divided by 4 (the number of the great cross) is 497. The running time of the album is 49 minutes and 32 seconds, and the leader length on a standard cassette is perhaps five seconds at each end, bringing the total click-to-click time to 49:42 - exactly one-tenth of 497. The year is thus divided into forty (forty days, forty nights; Wild Nights, Hot and Crazy Days had appeared two years earlier.)
Some may focus on the "it" in Ram It Down, the object. Is it a possession, an abstract quality - or rather, is "ram it" being used as an indivisible phrasal verb? That last theory might easily be dismissed, except for this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOYY6futWBc
But I think the simpler theory is the sounder one: Watch the JP video "Hot Rockin' " from seven years before and I trust you'll see what I mean without me having to explain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki3TpFZY7cU
What you just saw is the "it". Not any one element in the video, but rather the essence, its DNA if you will, its many fractions reduced as far as they can be. The concepts "ram", "it" and "down" (Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos; yin, yang, velocity/orientation/event space) are everywhere present and already have their permanent angular relationship to each other. I think you'll agree that IT could have been no other way.
Eh, Ram It Down mostly sucks by Priest standards. Blood Red Skies and the title track are okay. And Johnny B. Goode, WTF?
Friday, September 9, 2011
Luck and Skill
Let's say two expert Scrabble players, creatively named player A and player B, are playing a game against each other in a tournament. It's getting near the end of the game, and player A looks nearly certain to win. Player B then makes a clever setup play. If he draws the exact right tiles from the bag, he will have an unblockable bingo to go out and win. (For non-Scrabblers, a bingo is when you play all seven tiles and get the extra 50 points.) It's a real longshot: we'll say about 1-in-50. But as it happens, if player B makes any other play, his chance of winning is zero.
So 98 percent of the time, player B will lose anyway, and 2 percent of the time he'll pull out the miracle win. The question: If the miracle happens, all other things being assumed equal, does this mean that B's victory can be attributed 98 percent to luck and 2 percent to skill?
Well, yeah, it does. To the argument that the skill really caused the victory since without player B's astute setup play there's no way the win could have happened, the obvious response is that without hitting the 1-in-50 draw, there's no way it could have happened either. No matter how brilliant a Scrabble player our friend B is, a minimum of 49 times out of 50 he loses this game. Both the skill and the ridiculous luck are needed.
***
Why does this matter? Well, we commonly judge people by outcomes, with the implicit assumption that the outcome was an unavoidable consequence of the decisions behind it. Let's introduce another fellow, Bob. Bob is a bright, resourceful sort and has spent many an evening in his basement tinkering and experimenting. A few years ago he invented a gadget made of metal and plastic and computer parts - let's say it's a kitchen appliance. He formed a company to make and sell the things, and it turned out demand was high, and now he's got millions of dollars. Quite a success story!
Bob invented the gadget, he formed the company. The millions are all him, right? Ah, but the events that conspired to bring this situation about were in motion long before:
- A sizable portion of the world lives in poverty, often without access to clean water, food, sanitation and health services. Political unrest and war also affect millions upon millions of unlucky people. Had Bob been born in any such place, and the odds of that have to be at least 30-40 percent or so, he ain't becomin' no kitchen-appliance kingpin no matter what he does. Instead, he was born and lives in one of the safest, most prosperous places on earth (pick one). HUGE lucky break there.
- Bob is healthy. He doesn't have any major physical, mental or emotional disorders. Those don't absolutely rule out the type of success he's had, but many of them would have made it a hundred times harder if not impossible.
- Bob's family was well-off enough to live near good schools and send him to college.
- Bob hasn't had his life commandeered by family challenges or troubles.
- Bob has been able to get jobs that pay well enough to support him and leave him with enough free time and energy to tinker incessantly in his basement.
- Bob's invention uses metal, plastic and computer parts. Bob, of course, had nothing to do with mining or refining the metal or making the plastic or computer parts, nor with inventing the means by which these things are mass-produced and made available at a price regular folks like Bob could afford. He just bought the stuff and recombined it in a novel way. He went through a lot of metal and plastic during the invention and prototype phase, so he needed to have the luxury of ready materials for as long as it took to stumble on the right ones.
- Many, many inventions and scientific and technological advances are the result of happy accidents. Granted, someone has to be busy in the workshop or lab in the first place to observe and interpret the accidents, no fortune involved there, but that makes the happy accidents themselves no less unlikely. Penicillin is perhaps the best-known example: If Alexander Fleming's lab had been less messy, we might not have penicillin today. In Bob's case, it may be true, though it's not knowable, that a thousand other would-be inventors are just as ingenious as he is, but haven't stumbled on their one big happy accident yet.
And by no means is it only the big accidents that make a difference. Any creative or experimental process has many steps, and thus many places for happy accidents to occur. A great story I heard from an audio engineer long ago: during the recording of the Tubes' 1983 hit She's A Beauty, the producer liked how the song was shaping up but felt the chorus was missing a hook of some kind, and for a long time no musical idea seemed to fit. One night during playback, someone in the control room happened to spit his gum out into a metal trash can at exactly the right moment in the chorus. The sound of the spit and of the gum hitting the trash can gave the producer the idea to add the reverse-gated snare hit after the first line of lyrics, right before "she's a beauty..." Hard to imagine the song without that sound effect, and it helped make the chorus catchy and the song a big hit. Yeah, the producer had to be thus inspired, but without the guy spitting his gum out, that sound effect doesn't get added.
- Bob's business started in a good economic period, but as with many startups, it took a while before the company attracted interest and capital from investors. Had he started in an economic downturn, he would have had a harder time selling the product to begin with and investors would have been choosier - he might well have gone bust before his ship had a chance to come in.
- Once Bob started his company, that meant he had to hire. Even if one is smart about hiring, some hiring decisions work out far better than others and some good fortune is needed to find the right people for the job.
- Bob was also lucky someone else didn't get there first. If he gets beaten out by six months, Bob will have to find another way to riches. While Bob's a good inventor, so are lots of other people.
***
I could go on, listing twenty or thirty more ways in which Bob has either been smiled upon by good fortune or has benefited greatly from work done by others past and present. Even given that Bob is industrious, persistent, committed and wise, his millions are still a much, much longer shot than the 50-1 Scrabble play I mentioned before. There are a lot of industrious, persistent, committed and wise people in a world with a population of 7 billion. The overwhelming majority of them aren't close to being millionaires. (Bob is also intelligent, which surely has a good deal to do with his success - if Bob had an 80 IQ this doesn't happen - but intelligence is itself just another lottery at birth, so I didn't include it with the other personal qualities above.)
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, are you saying that Bob's success was just luck or that he didn't earn it or that hard work and persistence isn't actually valuable since it's all a roll of the dice anyway? No, I am absolutely NOT saying that, and no sensible person would. If Bob sits on his couch eating Doritos and watching old movies all day every day, his chances of getting wealthy drop to nothing regardless of how many good breaks he's gotten, unless he wins the lottery or something else ridiculous. Bob's hard work is absolutely necessary here - but it is not anywhere remotely close to sufficient. If it were possible to rerun Bob's life a million times, giving him all those same positive personal qualities each time but randomizing everything else, we can guess he would make out well much of the time relative to his peers, but in very, very few of those parallel lives would he be as rich as he's turned out to be this time.
This all strikes me as obvious, but as a culture we strongly resist attributing the main portion of success or failure to chance even when reason demands it. Not hard to see why: we think it's demotivating. We desperately want, maybe even need, to believe that if we just captain the ship well enough, we'll make it through any storm, even when confronted with a storm that is so much bigger than we are and could toss even the hardiest and wisest captain overboard to drown on its slightest whim.
But you know, we don't have to live in that kind of denial. If we focus only on the winning or losing, only on the extrinsic result, then we can't accept the primacy of chance in our lives, because if only the W or L matters, and the Ws and Ls are mostly determined by luck, then yes, trying is bound to feel futile. But if we focus on the intrinsic and just say, okay, I'll make the best decisions I know how to make and not worry about the outcome, then the fluctuations of luck become just part of the puzzle, not to be judged as either good or bad. And, getting back to Scrabble, that's exactly how I want to learn to approach every rack of every game, though I'm a long way from being there: focus only on making the best decision.
So 98 percent of the time, player B will lose anyway, and 2 percent of the time he'll pull out the miracle win. The question: If the miracle happens, all other things being assumed equal, does this mean that B's victory can be attributed 98 percent to luck and 2 percent to skill?
Well, yeah, it does. To the argument that the skill really caused the victory since without player B's astute setup play there's no way the win could have happened, the obvious response is that without hitting the 1-in-50 draw, there's no way it could have happened either. No matter how brilliant a Scrabble player our friend B is, a minimum of 49 times out of 50 he loses this game. Both the skill and the ridiculous luck are needed.
***
Why does this matter? Well, we commonly judge people by outcomes, with the implicit assumption that the outcome was an unavoidable consequence of the decisions behind it. Let's introduce another fellow, Bob. Bob is a bright, resourceful sort and has spent many an evening in his basement tinkering and experimenting. A few years ago he invented a gadget made of metal and plastic and computer parts - let's say it's a kitchen appliance. He formed a company to make and sell the things, and it turned out demand was high, and now he's got millions of dollars. Quite a success story!
Bob invented the gadget, he formed the company. The millions are all him, right? Ah, but the events that conspired to bring this situation about were in motion long before:
- A sizable portion of the world lives in poverty, often without access to clean water, food, sanitation and health services. Political unrest and war also affect millions upon millions of unlucky people. Had Bob been born in any such place, and the odds of that have to be at least 30-40 percent or so, he ain't becomin' no kitchen-appliance kingpin no matter what he does. Instead, he was born and lives in one of the safest, most prosperous places on earth (pick one). HUGE lucky break there.
- Bob is healthy. He doesn't have any major physical, mental or emotional disorders. Those don't absolutely rule out the type of success he's had, but many of them would have made it a hundred times harder if not impossible.
- Bob's family was well-off enough to live near good schools and send him to college.
- Bob hasn't had his life commandeered by family challenges or troubles.
- Bob has been able to get jobs that pay well enough to support him and leave him with enough free time and energy to tinker incessantly in his basement.
- Bob's invention uses metal, plastic and computer parts. Bob, of course, had nothing to do with mining or refining the metal or making the plastic or computer parts, nor with inventing the means by which these things are mass-produced and made available at a price regular folks like Bob could afford. He just bought the stuff and recombined it in a novel way. He went through a lot of metal and plastic during the invention and prototype phase, so he needed to have the luxury of ready materials for as long as it took to stumble on the right ones.
- Many, many inventions and scientific and technological advances are the result of happy accidents. Granted, someone has to be busy in the workshop or lab in the first place to observe and interpret the accidents, no fortune involved there, but that makes the happy accidents themselves no less unlikely. Penicillin is perhaps the best-known example: If Alexander Fleming's lab had been less messy, we might not have penicillin today. In Bob's case, it may be true, though it's not knowable, that a thousand other would-be inventors are just as ingenious as he is, but haven't stumbled on their one big happy accident yet.
And by no means is it only the big accidents that make a difference. Any creative or experimental process has many steps, and thus many places for happy accidents to occur. A great story I heard from an audio engineer long ago: during the recording of the Tubes' 1983 hit She's A Beauty, the producer liked how the song was shaping up but felt the chorus was missing a hook of some kind, and for a long time no musical idea seemed to fit. One night during playback, someone in the control room happened to spit his gum out into a metal trash can at exactly the right moment in the chorus. The sound of the spit and of the gum hitting the trash can gave the producer the idea to add the reverse-gated snare hit after the first line of lyrics, right before "she's a beauty..." Hard to imagine the song without that sound effect, and it helped make the chorus catchy and the song a big hit. Yeah, the producer had to be thus inspired, but without the guy spitting his gum out, that sound effect doesn't get added.
- Bob's business started in a good economic period, but as with many startups, it took a while before the company attracted interest and capital from investors. Had he started in an economic downturn, he would have had a harder time selling the product to begin with and investors would have been choosier - he might well have gone bust before his ship had a chance to come in.
- Once Bob started his company, that meant he had to hire. Even if one is smart about hiring, some hiring decisions work out far better than others and some good fortune is needed to find the right people for the job.
- Bob was also lucky someone else didn't get there first. If he gets beaten out by six months, Bob will have to find another way to riches. While Bob's a good inventor, so are lots of other people.
***
I could go on, listing twenty or thirty more ways in which Bob has either been smiled upon by good fortune or has benefited greatly from work done by others past and present. Even given that Bob is industrious, persistent, committed and wise, his millions are still a much, much longer shot than the 50-1 Scrabble play I mentioned before. There are a lot of industrious, persistent, committed and wise people in a world with a population of 7 billion. The overwhelming majority of them aren't close to being millionaires. (Bob is also intelligent, which surely has a good deal to do with his success - if Bob had an 80 IQ this doesn't happen - but intelligence is itself just another lottery at birth, so I didn't include it with the other personal qualities above.)
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, are you saying that Bob's success was just luck or that he didn't earn it or that hard work and persistence isn't actually valuable since it's all a roll of the dice anyway? No, I am absolutely NOT saying that, and no sensible person would. If Bob sits on his couch eating Doritos and watching old movies all day every day, his chances of getting wealthy drop to nothing regardless of how many good breaks he's gotten, unless he wins the lottery or something else ridiculous. Bob's hard work is absolutely necessary here - but it is not anywhere remotely close to sufficient. If it were possible to rerun Bob's life a million times, giving him all those same positive personal qualities each time but randomizing everything else, we can guess he would make out well much of the time relative to his peers, but in very, very few of those parallel lives would he be as rich as he's turned out to be this time.
This all strikes me as obvious, but as a culture we strongly resist attributing the main portion of success or failure to chance even when reason demands it. Not hard to see why: we think it's demotivating. We desperately want, maybe even need, to believe that if we just captain the ship well enough, we'll make it through any storm, even when confronted with a storm that is so much bigger than we are and could toss even the hardiest and wisest captain overboard to drown on its slightest whim.
But you know, we don't have to live in that kind of denial. If we focus only on the winning or losing, only on the extrinsic result, then we can't accept the primacy of chance in our lives, because if only the W or L matters, and the Ws and Ls are mostly determined by luck, then yes, trying is bound to feel futile. But if we focus on the intrinsic and just say, okay, I'll make the best decisions I know how to make and not worry about the outcome, then the fluctuations of luck become just part of the puzzle, not to be judged as either good or bad. And, getting back to Scrabble, that's exactly how I want to learn to approach every rack of every game, though I'm a long way from being there: focus only on making the best decision.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Streaks like this happen more than you'd think; Thanksgiving 1980
From 1952 through 1971 in pro football, no game ended with a score of 14-0.
Between 1978 and 1980, there were seven 14-0 games in the NFL. I actually remember watching one of them on TV. In 1980, the Redskins, in the midst of an off year not helped by John Riggins' holdout, were shut out at home by a Seahawks team that would end up 4-12 and give up over 400 points on the year. I didn't remember that Joe Theismann threw 4 interceptions that day, but I remember how shockingly badly the Redskins played as a team in that game. I do remember one of the interceptions, because it was batted in the air by a bunch of different players before a Seahawk came down with it and I thought it was funny. And I remember I was watching it upstairs - but wait, do I have that right? That would have been my baby sister's room by 1980. But the TV was up there for a while. Maybe Mary was still sleeping in Mom and Dad's room at the time of the Skins-Seahawks uglyfest. She would have been six months old then.
I remember Thanksgiving 1980 much more clearly, but not for pleasant reasons (well, it's funny now), and the Seahawks were also involved. I was ten. I woke up latish that morning, maybe 9:30 or 10, and was surprised to find no one downstairs. Not my parents, not my 8-year-old brother, not my baby sister. Very unusual. I was hungry and looked in the cupboard next to the stove where the cereal usually was, but again I was shocked: we had none. I had cereal for breakfast every day - the universe was not right, what would I do? The pantry wasn't promising either, but I did find something I liked: a can of vienna sausages. Six wrapped around one in the middle. Yeah, there we go. Mom usually gives me just two or three, but now I've got the whole can. Victory! Hmm, they have this funny goop on them - they usually don't when Mom serves them to me. Oh well, I guess these are a different kind. The goop I didn't like, but it didn't occur to me to rinse it off. I was a hungry boy and plowed through the sausages in a hurry. Then I settled on the couch to read my new 1980 Stars of the NFL book and fell back asleep for a little while.
I woke up near the end of the first football game, and turned on the TV around the fourth quarter of the Bears vs. the Lions. Walter Payton had an 85-yard TD run called back on a holding penalty, if I remember right. Game went to overtime, and oh my god, the Bears ran the kickoff back, game over! That had never happened before in NFL history. David Williams's claim to fame. Next up was the Cowboys and Seahawks. By this point I was starting to feel sick to my stomach, and I was wondering what the heck was going on - it was Thanksgiving afternoon, and I still hadn't seen anyone come downstairs. Surely there was going to be turkey and all that, right? No one had told me there wasn't. Didn't know what else to do, so I curled up under the covers on the couch and read my book and watched the game while I got sicker. Still no one for a while. The then-mighty Cowboys really laid it on Seattle; hopeless game. I was rooting for Seattle, but after a while just wondered how high the score would go. The final was 51-7, by which time my stomach felt about as good as the Seahawks did.
Finally saw my mom, in her robe, around the time it was getting dark. She got me some Coke and saltines, comfort food for her kiddo's upset tummy (yes, it works really well), and explained the day: both my parents had been bedridden and throwing up all day from a blazingly nasty virus. My brother Brian was similarly miserable and indisposed. Miraculously, my baby sister slept nearly the whole day, and the night following. Mom put on her coat and I put on mine and we got in the car and went to the only place that was open, a small convenience store on highway 301, near the park where my dad played softball. I think we got ham sandwiches or something - I don't think it was turkey, despite the holiday. I felt bad but I was starving and anything to banish the unspeakably foul daylong memory of the vienna sausage, stock included, was welcome. I had liked vienna sausage before that day, but have not eaten it in the thirty-one years since. Sure enough, the sickness everyone else got was hitting me too by this point, and it was a rough night, but I think I got off easier than the rest of the family had. And strangely, some or all of us got sick on a few of the Thanksgivings after that. It was an unfortunate family tradition for a while there.
Between 1978 and 1980, there were seven 14-0 games in the NFL. I actually remember watching one of them on TV. In 1980, the Redskins, in the midst of an off year not helped by John Riggins' holdout, were shut out at home by a Seahawks team that would end up 4-12 and give up over 400 points on the year. I didn't remember that Joe Theismann threw 4 interceptions that day, but I remember how shockingly badly the Redskins played as a team in that game. I do remember one of the interceptions, because it was batted in the air by a bunch of different players before a Seahawk came down with it and I thought it was funny. And I remember I was watching it upstairs - but wait, do I have that right? That would have been my baby sister's room by 1980. But the TV was up there for a while. Maybe Mary was still sleeping in Mom and Dad's room at the time of the Skins-Seahawks uglyfest. She would have been six months old then.
I remember Thanksgiving 1980 much more clearly, but not for pleasant reasons (well, it's funny now), and the Seahawks were also involved. I was ten. I woke up latish that morning, maybe 9:30 or 10, and was surprised to find no one downstairs. Not my parents, not my 8-year-old brother, not my baby sister. Very unusual. I was hungry and looked in the cupboard next to the stove where the cereal usually was, but again I was shocked: we had none. I had cereal for breakfast every day - the universe was not right, what would I do? The pantry wasn't promising either, but I did find something I liked: a can of vienna sausages. Six wrapped around one in the middle. Yeah, there we go. Mom usually gives me just two or three, but now I've got the whole can. Victory! Hmm, they have this funny goop on them - they usually don't when Mom serves them to me. Oh well, I guess these are a different kind. The goop I didn't like, but it didn't occur to me to rinse it off. I was a hungry boy and plowed through the sausages in a hurry. Then I settled on the couch to read my new 1980 Stars of the NFL book and fell back asleep for a little while.
I woke up near the end of the first football game, and turned on the TV around the fourth quarter of the Bears vs. the Lions. Walter Payton had an 85-yard TD run called back on a holding penalty, if I remember right. Game went to overtime, and oh my god, the Bears ran the kickoff back, game over! That had never happened before in NFL history. David Williams's claim to fame. Next up was the Cowboys and Seahawks. By this point I was starting to feel sick to my stomach, and I was wondering what the heck was going on - it was Thanksgiving afternoon, and I still hadn't seen anyone come downstairs. Surely there was going to be turkey and all that, right? No one had told me there wasn't. Didn't know what else to do, so I curled up under the covers on the couch and read my book and watched the game while I got sicker. Still no one for a while. The then-mighty Cowboys really laid it on Seattle; hopeless game. I was rooting for Seattle, but after a while just wondered how high the score would go. The final was 51-7, by which time my stomach felt about as good as the Seahawks did.
Finally saw my mom, in her robe, around the time it was getting dark. She got me some Coke and saltines, comfort food for her kiddo's upset tummy (yes, it works really well), and explained the day: both my parents had been bedridden and throwing up all day from a blazingly nasty virus. My brother Brian was similarly miserable and indisposed. Miraculously, my baby sister slept nearly the whole day, and the night following. Mom put on her coat and I put on mine and we got in the car and went to the only place that was open, a small convenience store on highway 301, near the park where my dad played softball. I think we got ham sandwiches or something - I don't think it was turkey, despite the holiday. I felt bad but I was starving and anything to banish the unspeakably foul daylong memory of the vienna sausage, stock included, was welcome. I had liked vienna sausage before that day, but have not eaten it in the thirty-one years since. Sure enough, the sickness everyone else got was hitting me too by this point, and it was a rough night, but I think I got off easier than the rest of the family had. And strangely, some or all of us got sick on a few of the Thanksgivings after that. It was an unfortunate family tradition for a while there.
Snapshot
What I do right now: playing Scrabble, directing the local Scrabble club and tournaments, writing and recording music, practicing drums and vocals, meditation, work, exercise, spending time with family and being Uncle Geoff to a number of recently born individuals, reading (nonfiction mostly), blogging, reading Scrabble- and pro sports-related sites and Facebook/Google+, learning math and languages, taking walks, eating restaurant food, patronizing my local convenience store too often, drinking beer (less lately, which is wise), sleeping. That's plenty.
Still live in a small one-bedroom apartment, which is more than enough. Almost never have company. I've never had or wanted a pet. No TV, no video game system. Very rarely see a movie; I much prefer comedies when I do. Never listen to the radio. Don't read a daily paper or visit news sites online very often. I believe that while the ever-present news cycle is not a bad thing in itself, it's good for one's happiness to check in on it rarely.
My entire list of furniture: double bed, two card tables, two folding chairs. I own fewer than twenty books. Enough clothes to get me through a week in winter or summer, and one suit that doesn't fit me so well as it did ten years ago, but not much more. My music collection, to the extent people even need music collections these days, is almost entirely mp3s. I don't collect anything else. I have a rickety laptop, a netbook that mostly is used for Scrabble club and on trips, an iPhone I just got and an iPod that I'll probably move along soon. Music equipment: digital recorder, electronic drum kit, keyboard, electric guitar, 6-string acoustic, 12-string acoustic, a bass, a saxophone (can't play it in the apartment though, too loud), a microphone, small studio speakers, small guitar amp. It all gets used. My Toyota Camry is from 1993, has almost 230,000 miles on it and rocks a lovely array of cosmetic deficits, but it has air conditioning and gets me where I need to go most of the time. (I recently looked into upgrading in the transportation department, and I'll have to write another entry about that. Bizarre.) I own almost nothing I haven't just mentioned, and that's how I like it.
I attach sentimental value to an object extremely rarely - a thing is a thing is a thing to me. By far my longest-tenured possession is a ratty blue plastic giveaway tote bag with the American Health Care Association emblem on it, from a convention held in Hawaii in late 1974. My father worked for the AHCA at the time and so he and my mother went there and gave us (me, four, and my little brother Brian, two) these tote bags when they got back. All sorts of things have been stored in the tote bag over the years: little kids' let's-play-dress-up clothes, baseball cards, bad poetry, cheap cassettes with songs taped off the radio, hidden cigarettes and dope, tangled guitar cables, old music magazines, love letters, Scrabble books. There's nothing in it now; it just sits on the floor of my closet, as it has since near the back border of my memory. It wouldn't break my heart to lose it, but I think I'll hold on to this one.
Happier right now than I've ever been, except for no one around to share it with. Making relationships last has not been my strong suit heretofore, but if that never happens, so what? Why dwell on what you don't have when there's so much in the world to appreciate? Maybe in a couple or three years if everything goes well, I'll start to look that direction. There's no rush. I'm very used to and comfortable with being alone, and the workshop table is full.
I'd enjoy reading other people's versions of this, what their lives are like.
Still live in a small one-bedroom apartment, which is more than enough. Almost never have company. I've never had or wanted a pet. No TV, no video game system. Very rarely see a movie; I much prefer comedies when I do. Never listen to the radio. Don't read a daily paper or visit news sites online very often. I believe that while the ever-present news cycle is not a bad thing in itself, it's good for one's happiness to check in on it rarely.
My entire list of furniture: double bed, two card tables, two folding chairs. I own fewer than twenty books. Enough clothes to get me through a week in winter or summer, and one suit that doesn't fit me so well as it did ten years ago, but not much more. My music collection, to the extent people even need music collections these days, is almost entirely mp3s. I don't collect anything else. I have a rickety laptop, a netbook that mostly is used for Scrabble club and on trips, an iPhone I just got and an iPod that I'll probably move along soon. Music equipment: digital recorder, electronic drum kit, keyboard, electric guitar, 6-string acoustic, 12-string acoustic, a bass, a saxophone (can't play it in the apartment though, too loud), a microphone, small studio speakers, small guitar amp. It all gets used. My Toyota Camry is from 1993, has almost 230,000 miles on it and rocks a lovely array of cosmetic deficits, but it has air conditioning and gets me where I need to go most of the time. (I recently looked into upgrading in the transportation department, and I'll have to write another entry about that. Bizarre.) I own almost nothing I haven't just mentioned, and that's how I like it.
I attach sentimental value to an object extremely rarely - a thing is a thing is a thing to me. By far my longest-tenured possession is a ratty blue plastic giveaway tote bag with the American Health Care Association emblem on it, from a convention held in Hawaii in late 1974. My father worked for the AHCA at the time and so he and my mother went there and gave us (me, four, and my little brother Brian, two) these tote bags when they got back. All sorts of things have been stored in the tote bag over the years: little kids' let's-play-dress-up clothes, baseball cards, bad poetry, cheap cassettes with songs taped off the radio, hidden cigarettes and dope, tangled guitar cables, old music magazines, love letters, Scrabble books. There's nothing in it now; it just sits on the floor of my closet, as it has since near the back border of my memory. It wouldn't break my heart to lose it, but I think I'll hold on to this one.
Happier right now than I've ever been, except for no one around to share it with. Making relationships last has not been my strong suit heretofore, but if that never happens, so what? Why dwell on what you don't have when there's so much in the world to appreciate? Maybe in a couple or three years if everything goes well, I'll start to look that direction. There's no rush. I'm very used to and comfortable with being alone, and the workshop table is full.
I'd enjoy reading other people's versions of this, what their lives are like.
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