Keyboard Philosopher

I’m doing a bit of work to get things better organized around here. I have the both fortunate and unfortunate affliction of having far too many interests—the harm in this is that if I blog about what’s on my mind, there’s no way anyone else will actually want to follow along.

From here on, this blog is going to focus on lifehacking, location-independence, and entrepreneurism. It’s about embracing your passions, eschewing societal standards, and living an awesome life. I’m also thinking I’ll put a more personal spin on things, sharing my successes and failures and inviting you, as a reader, to keep me on track.

Towards these ends I’ve pulled down some content. Particularly you’ll no longer see posts about programming, etc. In the meantime I will move those posts to http://camdez.tumblr.com and we’ll see where they end up long term.

—Cameron

Yeah, sure, New Year’s resolutions, fine. Well I sort of missed it, so I gave myself until the end of January to plot my year.

I generally wanted to embrace the S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) goal-setting concept where possible and practical, so what’s below is divided into the discrete, check-it-off-when-done tasks, and the more abstract goals I’ve haven’t wrangled into task form (or don’t want to take the time to track, like some of the dailies).

Here’s the blueprint to build a 2010 that I will find awesome in reflection:

Entrepreneurship

Know how to execute most small business plans so that I can rapidly convert ideas into experiments; know how to run a company successfully.

• ☐ Start another company
• ☐ Outsource some business tasks to solidify understanding, eliminate barriers
• ☐ Create a short document synthesizing what I’ve learned about marketing

Health

Improve and then maintain health, optimizing for longevity. Try for (and realistically achieve) the best health of my adult life.

• Resume running regularly
• Spend 30+ minutes outside everyday (weather permitting), for general sanity and for vitamin D
• ☐ Complete Couch-to-5K (stopped last year after getting sick and then hitting the cold winter)
• ☐ Experiment with meditation
• Synthesize, internalize, and share (☐) newfound knowledge of nutrition

Language Learning

Solidify Japanese, then start thinking about another language.

• ☐ Learn all 1,945 Jouyou kanji (meanings only), know ~400 at present
• ☐ Take the JLPT (level 3? 2?); December 5th, registration in July

Meta

Optimize and systemize personal processes.

• Incorporate more feedback and optimization (data and accountability)
• Systemize goal-setting process (even if a 90% solution)
• Create a heroic personal definition and attempt to live up to it
• Write personal stories (especially for 2009)
• Stick to GTD. In fact, do it better

Money

Develop sources of location-independent, automated, diversified income. Wisely manage the money I have.

• ☐ Create two more income streams
• ☐ Achieve net positive cash flow (even if this must include active income)
• ☐ Earn $1k per month in passive income by the end of the year

Social

Overcome anxieties (however small), make smalltalk, make more friends, be friendlier to strangers, be a better storyteller. Network better.

• Participate in more groups and be a better participant (more regular, more engaged)
• Embrace opportunities to enter new social circles
• ☐ Hang out with a new friend every month
• ☐ Re-engage an old friend every month

Travel

• ☐ Visit at least four new places
• ☐ Visit at least two new countries

Writing

• ☐ Write at least four blog posts per month
• ☐ Complete at least one longer project (15+ pages). Book? Ebook?
• Be more attentive to writing effectiveness

Other

• ☐ Read 24 books (19 in 2009)
• ☐ Learn to surf

The plan is to track these items on this template (plain-text, markdown formatted, Unicode encoded). If you’re tracking your goals you might consider stealing some chunks of the file. Or, if you have improvements, I’d love to hear about them!

When I sat down to write this I was convinced that 2009 was a fairly crappy year. I feel like I spent about half the year blocked by circumstance from doing the things I really wanted to do. But after compiling a list of how I actually spent my time I realize that while it wasn’t everything I hoped it could be it, it was still pretty freaking cool.

Here’s a list of some of the more interesting occurrences of 2009:

• Went camping on a whim in the cold in Tyler State Park, read Walden in the woods, “lived like men”, admired the constellations in the clear air, tried to catch fish with bamboo poles, cooked over an open flame, and tried not to freeze to death sleeping on the hard ground. (Jan 9-11)
• Finished my Flying Saucer 200-beer tour (begun in 2006) with a tasty Maredsous 10! Look for my plate on the wall in Addison! (Jan 19)
  
• Lost my best friend for reasons that have never been explained to me. (~Feb 20)
• Completed my in-person interview in Houston, the last step in the applying to the JET Programme. Stayed with my incredibly awesome cousin Chris (Feb 24). Eventually got JET alternate status, considered it, and finally withdrew my application in late June instead of waiting even more months for the possibility of teaching in Japan (I hate waiting).
• My paternal grandfather passed away and my family met up in Simi Valley, CA for the funeral. Instead of simply grieving, it turned into an incredible, rare opportunity for all of us to get together and enjoy life. I’ve never had more fun with my family or felt closer to them. Lots of card-playing and midnight Del Taco runs. It’s also way more fun than I expected to drink with the family. (Mar 5-8)
• Decided to undertake what I called Project Life Reset, with the intention of disconnecting from my current situations, eschewing ties to any particular location, living cheaply, traveling, and really living instead of simply existing. I wasn’t able to fully enact my plan due to exterior constraints, but the motivation is still there and constraints are nearly gone (2010 is going to rock!).
• Followed my convictions and quit my job on the beliefs that now is the best time to do most anything, and that 9-to-5 is a deadend for me. (May 29)
  
  The view from the office I left to be in that world instead of just looking at it out the window.
• Turned 25 (the last age I’m even moderately comfortable with). Getting oooold. Celebrated (grieved?) with friends at Gloria’s in Garland. (Jun 17).
  
• Logged night after (late) night in the pool and hot tub over the summer, having amazing philosophical conversations, drinking copious amounts of alcohol with Matt, Richard, and other irregulars.
• What started as a fast food run turned into an impromptu adventure one late night after I talked about experimenting with hobo living. We ate under a highway, wrote (harmless) graffiti, then walked miles in the darkness of abandoned Dallas train tracks, including a rickety, decrepit bridge 20+ feet over questionable waters. (Jul 1)
  
  The view when we finally emerged from the treed path of the tracks.
• Spent many, many days at my café “offices” of Escapé and Java & Cha (mostly working on Raconteur and writing), to the point where the J&C girls would start making my drink before I even ordered—being a regular is fun!
• Took up running. Started the Couch-to-5K program, something Richard had mentioned over the summer; made serious headway but stopped after getting sick and then the weather getting cold.
• Visited my mother in Nebraska, put together a website for her (Aug 24), taught her about SEO, and drank Bombay Sapphire and tonics with my step-dad.
• Fired a revolutionary war-style black powder gun (reproduction) and an original Winchester shotgun from 1897! (Aug 30)
  
  Reload!
• Traveled to the Black Hills, SD: saw Mount Rushmore and lots of bison, as well as signs of an upwardly-mobile Chinese middle-class. =) (Aug 31)
  
• Started my first company, Too Much Tea LLC (Sep 14)
• Laura and I ran a 5K (Sep 19)! Probably no big deal but I’ve never been a very physical person and I never imagined I’d run a race of any kind.
  My running bib. Note the beer knurd shirt!
• Attended the Fall Festival in the Japanese garden at the Fort Worth Botanical gardens (gorgeous!). Koi, ikebana, banzai, koto playing, sushi, odori, tea ceremony, taiko, oh my! (Oct 25)
  
  I shit you not, this is in Fort Worth.
• Wrote and released (Nov 19) an app for iPhone called Raconteur.
• Got in a horrible car accident on my way to Louisiana to see my family for Christmas. Totalled the car, lost the presents, but managed to escape mostly in-tact! Might have been live affirming had I not already been sold on life. (Dec 23)
  
• Adopted an attitude of materialistic minimalism. Reduced my possessions. Not drastically, but a good start.
• Read 19 books (not great, not horrible) 16 non-fiction, 3 fiction.
  
  Part of my library and a very tired me, packing.
• Wrote TONS. Mostly unreleased, but I have picked up the pace of polishing and releasing since the start of 2010.
• Stopped watching TV (I see a bit here and there but I don’t follow a single show).
• Learned to better organize and track my life using a GTD-like system, ToodleDo, Raconteur, and a variety of on-paper methods. Projects, tasks, responsibilities, goals, and daily activities all recorded with decent regularity (though there is room for improvement).
• Learned quite a bit about company structures, taxes, entrepreneurship, and marketing.
• Learned approximately 400 kanji and increased my Japanese vocabulary with the help of Smart.fm.
• Generated 118 business ideas (of varying quality) in one hour to prove it could be done.
• Defined what I’m living for by identifying 67 life goals and planning steps to achieve them.
• Generated and honed lots of great new ideas for company projects and made good starts on some.
• Spent way too much money keeping my pets alive. They’d better be grateful. =)
  
  Mr. Sixxington and his thinkorswim monkey.

Things I’ve loved this year:

• Sunday phở! Fills my stomach, anchors my week, and generally makes me feel good about life. The ultimate comfort food. I’m still partial to Bistro B (thanks, Keli).
  
  Photo by avixyz.
• Sherlock’s. I can’t quite call it my favorite bar in Dallas (that honor probably still goes to Kona Grill), but nowhere but Sherlock’s has delivered such a reliably great experience. Always a crowd, always live music, and always great service from the coolest waitresses around (thanks, A., J., P.—you guys rock).
• Gunpowder ginseng green tea from Central Market. Cheap and delicious. My everyday tea.
• In books: The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, Walden by Thoreau, and The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.
• Git and GitHub.com
• Tumblr (migrated from Wordpress Dec 11)
• Dropbox. Never worry about losing anything again? I’m in.

Most importantly though, I have a better idea of what I’m living for than ever before. The happiest times in my life have always been the ones where I was living in greatest alignment with my principles, all else be damned. I’m almost back there. I also feel more capable in managing my day-to-day affairs and better at planning how to achieve what I want.

A giant thanks to all the awesome people in my life—you guys make me feel truly fortunate.

(Photo: left-hand)

My friend Richard recently commented to me how curious it is that people alive today know little more about how to be human than the people who came before us. It’s an interesting point. Sure, we have an increased understanding of the physical world, but there’s no state-of-the-art for how to conduct our daily activities. Collectively, we don’t seem to be progressing on this most basic front.

Enter lifehacking. A lifehacker is someone who wishes to elevate his or her basic knowledge of human existence; someone who injects reason and efficiency tricks (“hacks”) into the humblest of everyday activities.

Originally the term had a strong technological flavor, coming from the shortcuts programmers created to automate tasks and manage daily affairs, but now it’s becoming more general. Technology is a useful tool in the lifehacker’s bag, but a great deal of lifehacking requires no more technology than a pen and paper, and some, even less.

The topics lifehacking addresses are often ignored for consideration precisely because of their humility. These things seem so simple that we assume there’s nothing left to solve and no revelations to uncover. Or we find the topics so commonplace that we don’t even notice their presence, despite being in everything we do.

The lifehack approach says that we should take the analytic machinery we apply to basic problem solving (or scientific research, in the more radical case), and turn it back on our own existence. It’s the idea that we should develop and leverage systems to manage the basic things in life—often thought too basic to systemize—like productivity, sleep, goal-setting, personal development, fun & fufillment, time management, learning, human relations, etc.

By systemizing these things we can hopefully advance the state-of-the-art (if only for ourselves!) and be better at the most basic and often most important elements of human existence. Which is truly more valuable: making faster computers or making more time in your life to do what you want? Yet how much more time and energy is devoted to the former?

Lifehacking isn’t complicated. It’s an attitude of experimentation coupled with an open mind. It’s asking questions about things people don’t ask about, and sometimes testing potential answers on yourself. But it does carry the implicit suggestion that we’re not doing things optimally, that there are shortcuts, and that we can exploit them if we have the dedication and willingness to try.

I feel that we’re living in an interesting time, where a lifehacking culture is developing, because as basic as most of the topics are, they apply to all of us. There have always been lifehackers (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci, experimenting with polyphasic sleep), but now there’s a growing number of people exploring life, becoming wiser about it, and sharing those discoveries with others.

Different people have vastly differing degrees of commitment to the lifehacker idea. Some may simply cherry-pick a hack or two to add to their life; perhaps an organization system or a mind-mapping methodology. Others get wrapped up in the concept of lifehacking, trying out various new ideas and becoming the originators of systems embraced by thousands.

There’s also a spectrum of generality, from the clever tricks of a particular field—which we might consider “hacks” more than “lifehacks”—to the most general of core lifehacks. I’ve leave you with some examples of these core lifehacks, techniques anyone could employ, to solidify the idea:

• The mneumonic peg system, for memorizing any list of ten items in less than a minute, with random order recall. Here’s a great explanation and video by Tynan.
• The tickler file, for tracking (and being reminded of) time-sensitive actions.
• Speedreading, fairly self-explanatory. See Tim Ferris’ implementation.
• Polyphasic sleep, the practice of sleeping multiple times per day (for less than 8 hours), exploiting the circadian rhythms to achieve more time awake each day.

The possible examples are innumerable, but that should be enough to give you the basic idea and starting building on the lifehacking concept.

(Photo: nattu)

The only thing actually real is the now, and human lives are exceedingly short. One day we’ll look back on our past activities to see how we’ve lived our lives and garner if we’ve spent them well or ill. In that moment, all past life is compressed to nothing more than a narrative, the more interesting events reduced to chapters or mentions and the less interesting ones forgotten entirely.

That said, plan to write the best story you can. Plan to write a story you’ll be proud to look back on. Don’t think of the legacy you’ll leave for others—think of the legacy you’ll leave for yourself. If your life flashed before your eyes in impending doom, what would you remember? Would you remember anything at all? Some of us have pretty empty tales.

Use that test to determine if your life is full of empty pastimes and cheap thrills, or if you’re collecting memories that will fill a beloved treasury of adventures.

Consider yourself as the hero in your own story. Are you worthy of that title? What would your story’s hero do in the situation you are in? Shouldn’t you be doing that? You can’t expect to be in a hero’s scenario, but shouldn’t you be taking a hero’s actions? Following in a hero’s footsteps?

Don’t use this idea as an excuse to live in the past either—if you’re living in the past you’ve stopped making adventures, and why have fewer adventures when you can have more?

You only get one shot at this life. Don’t play it safe—be exceptional.

A little over a month ago I released an iPhone application called Raconteur. And while It may not be especially groundbreaking, it was a hugely important for me because it’s one of the few things I’ve ever finished. On my own, with no external requirements, and no one driving me, I finished it.

Oh, I start things. I have 58 unpublished blog drafts (probably a dozen more on paper) and scores of projects in my version control repositories. I just don’t finish them.

Looking around in my life lately I keep seeing people who have great ideas but never seem to have the motivation to get them implemented. I know that I used to be one of those people too but I think I’ve finally broken away from the old ways. Here are my best tips for finding the motivation to do (and finish!) big things, many of which I leveraged while developing Raconteur.

• Know what you are doing. Have what you are making clearly laid out before you, written down, drawn out, or mocked-up—something physical. Solidify the goal.
• Know why you are doing what you are doing. Have a clear reason for the project. Write it down. With explanations if necessary. Write as if you were trying to convince someone else: when you hit the motivation slump you need to be able to look at this and convince yourself. As Seth Godin explains in The Dip, basically anything worth doing will have a tough period you’ll simply need to power through¹. You need to have decided up-front, for sure, if this was worth working on, and have laid out your argument so that you won’t re-evaluate in this state where you are less likely to be honest with yourself².
• Take baby steps. If you’re working on something worth doing, there will be times when you’ll look at the enormity of the task and feel overwhelmed. Instead of remaining stagnant and stressing, ask yourself “what is the simplest thing I could do that would move me towards my goal?”, then do that thing. As Lao-Tze said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
• Embrace detours. If you’re like me, you find that day-to-day you don’t have the “psychic energy” to power through certain tasks, but others don’t seem too bad (David Allen talks about this). To make this style of productivity work, you need to know what steps you can take from here. Keep a quick (non-exhaustive) list of things you need to do soon so you can cherry-pick what you are up for. If almost nothing seems palatable, look for a research task you’ll eventually have to tackle before you’ll be able to deal with some future “real” work.
• Accept some slack time. Down days happen. Sometimes you get sick. Sometimes you’re just not up for it. Accept it—don’t even be upset with yourself. Just try not to let two or three happen back-to-back and you’ll be OK.
• Track your progress. Whether it’s a paper checklist or a Github page, you need something to show you how far you’ve come. If you can chart it, graph it, log it, or list it, you’ll know you’re getting there and you’ll realize that it is possible.
• Leverage inspiration. Keep a list of things that inspire you. With Raconteur this was a list of iPhone apps that I felt were top notch; I’d fire them up, fiddle with them, explore the tiny little style touches and know that I wanted to make something that stylish, that well made. Maybe I didn’t get there, but it brought up the quality of my work. My RSS reader is often a source of writing inspiration for me. If you’re a visual person, consider a vision board.

Do you have any motivation tips to share?

Footnotes

1. That doesn’t make the converse true! Everything hard is not necessarily worth doing.
2. Unless, of course, new information comes to light.

(Photo: Paul Mannix)

I’ve tried blogging many times, but my forays into online writing always grind to a halt. The explanation for this is partly psychological and partly technological: I latch onto minor dislikes I have with blogging tools/platforms and I can’t overcome them because of my perfectionist nature. I’d rather leave the blogging ‘problem’ unsolved than to solve it imperfectly.

I have serious difficulties with accepting 90% solutions to problems. I suspect this is a shared engineer trait. 90% solutions are so aggravating because they bring you close enough to perfection that you can nearly touch it—but you can’t quite. It’s like the occasional drop-out in that YouTube video you really wanted to watch that makes you turn the damn thing off completely.

The situation reminds me of roboticist Masahiro Mori’s essay The Uncanny Valley:

There are mathematical functions of the form y = f(x) for which the value of y increases (or decreases) continuously with the value of x. For example, as the effort x increases, income y increases, or as a car’s accelerator is pressed, the car moves faster. This kind of relationship is ubiquitous and easily understood. In fact, it covers most phenomena, so we might think that this function can represent all relations. That is why people are usually upset when faced with some phenomenon it cannot represent.

Climbing a mountain is an example of a function that does not increase continuously: a person’s altitude y does not always increase as the distance from the summit decreases owing to the intervening hills and valleys. I have noticed that, as robots appear more human-like, our sense of their familiarity increases until we come to a valley. I call this relation the “uncanny valley.”

The Uncanny Valley as it applies to robotics (or 3D animation) can actually be quite disturbing, resulting in human-like robots that seem more like zombies or even psychopaths because, (I surmise) the entities in question are similar enough to humans to trigger our brains’ mechanisms for detecting our fellow humans, but not perfect enough to be indistinguishable from actual humans. Our brains essentially detect an impostor.

For a perfectionist, happiness with a design can illustrate this same behavior; a better design makes us happier until it reaches a point (near to perfection) where the flaws in the design seem to stand out in an especially strong way.

Often 50% solutions are actually more desirable (and almost certainly more practically effective) due entirely to these psychological factors. I find that I can adopt a 50% solution thinking “this will work for now”, but I’ll drive myself crazy with a 90% solution I’d view as an imperfect permanent solution. With 50% solutions I’ve psychologically accepted the imperfection; with 90% I haven’t, yet it’s still there.

I’ll try to bring this to a more concrete level:

Until recently I had a storage closet jumble which would have driven me mad had it not had a door which hid its clutter, yet I never did much to permanently resolve the situation. You’d think that I’d take the time to deal with something which irritated me so, but fundamentally, I couldn’t solve the problem. If I needed to retrieve something from the disaster area I’d wade in, find it, and leave with a hefty sigh over the hopelessness of the situation.

The problem was that every time I saw the mess I looked at it as an engineer: it was a problem to be solved. What was the ideal solution? I could put this in one container and that in another, but there weren’t discernible, natural groupings. Which things should go together? They were unrelated! My engineering mind said, “the ideal solution hasn’t yet presented itself, but surely it will”. But it never did.

This is well-explained in the essay on Devizen entitled Programming Can Ruin Your Life:

Programmers become obsessed with perfection. This is why they are constantly talking about rewrites. They cannot resist optimum solutions. Perfection requires tossing aside mediocre ideas in search of great ones. A good programmer would rather leave a problem temporarily unsolved than solve it poorly. A good solution takes into account all predictable outcomes and solves the largest number of them in the most efficient way. This mindset prevents you from writing code with limited utility and life span. While it’s a wonderful trait to have in programming, the demons of scope and efficiency will start to assert themselves on your ordinary life. You will avoid taking care of simple things because the solution is inelegant or simply feels wrong. Time to think will no doubt yield a better result, you’ll say.

Unable to find an ideal solution, I put the project aside and waited for one, until eventually, when the need for space reclamation arose, I stumbled upon the incredibly obvious 50% solution of moving the entire disaster out of my apartment. I’ve been satisfied ever since.

This sounds like the nit-picky, pointless tale of one man’s inability to wrangle his rubbish, but I assure you it’s much more. It’s the tale of a man who has missed important meetings because he can’t find a calendaring application which satisfies his requirements. It’s the story of a dozen stillborn projects.

It’s the face that would have launched a thousand ships but couldn’t find optimal material to make sails from. And for people with this personality trait, it really does matter.

Perfectionism has its charms. Certainly it’s the reason many things are so very good. But if we’re not producing anything because of it, we need to listen to Voltaire’s advice and remember that sometimes, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”¹

When perfectionism has us held hostage, what can we do? Here are three strategies:

“Escape by Design”

I’ve borrowed this title from The Uncanny Valley:

We hope to design robots or prosthetic hands that will not fall into the uncanny valley. So I recommend designers take the first peak as the goal in building robots rather than the second. Although the second peak is higher, there is a far greater risk of falling into the uncanny valley. We predict that it is possible to produce a safe familiarity by a nonhumanlike design. So designers please consider this point. A good example is glasses. Glasses do not resemble the real eyeball, but this design is adequate and can make the eyes more charming. So we should follow this principle when we design prosthetic eyes.

Masahiro Mori is talking about making robots that don’t attempt to look human so that they don’t fall short of looking identical to humans; robots that look like (say) cartoon characters don’t trigger our innate disgust for the flawed (for a deeper treatment of the uncanny valley problem, go here).

In other words, do more by doing less. Accept the “50% solution” as passable with the knowledge (personal or even public) that it isn’t your best work, or wasn’t quite up to your original intention but is still an accomplishment.

Release Iteratively

If you have the luxury of working in a field like (much of) software or web content, release iteratively. Release small, perfected nuggets and build on them later. Don’t ship broken features or immature content, just ship less content and work your way up to the masterpiece.

Make Hard Commitments

Real artists ship, so make big, firm promises to ship the product and stick to them (I’ve done this recently with Raconteur, promising my users an important update before Christmas).

From the 37signals book:

Here’s an easy way to launch on time and on budget: keep them fixed. Never throw more time or money at a problem, just scale back the scope.

This might cause you to release something imperfect (which might even be good for you), or it might just give you the motivation to power through to perfection.

Discussion

Are you held hostage by perfectionism? You know who you are. Can you share any additional tips on freeing yourself from its clutches?

Footnotes

1. The original quote in French is “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.”, from Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764).

Sacha Chua posted a nice list of resources for learning the Japanese language on her blog (I’ve been reading her blog for a while and didn’t even know she studied Japanese), which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to post about a new Japanese (and other foreign language learning) site that I’m completely hooked on:

Lang-8 is a language exchange social networking site. This means that all of the members of the site are working toward the common goal of learning a foreign language. At the core of the site is the ability to maintain a blog in the language you are learning. Your blog is then checked for correctness by other users of the site, generally who speak your target language natively. The correctors can highlight your mistakes, insert or change words, and leave comments.

The beauty of the approach is that you tend to get paired up with people who natively speak the language you are attempting to learn, and who are learning your native language; this means that the relationships are mutually beneficial. This mechanism works astoundingly well. I find that posts tend to get corrected in less than ten minutes after they are posted, and just by correcting other people’s posts you can enlist a team of friends to correct your posts in a few minutes’ work.

Technologically speaking the site is a bit immature (though not quite down to the Myspace level), but the developers are directly at hand within the Lang-8 community and seem quite interested in improving the quality of the site. As an example of the closeness between the community and the developers, you’ll see the developers make posts in a standard Lang-8 diary and other users will translate these posts into other languages so that more community members can understand their content. I cannot recommend Lang-8 enough.

Beyond that, my favorite internet resources for learning Japanese—some of which Sacha already covered—are:

• Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar
• Jim Breen’s Japanese Dictionary Server
• Perapera-kun / Rikai-chan extensions for Firefox

One cannot overstate the importance of the Firefox extensions, either; they simply are essential. They’re enough to bring me back to Firefox time-after-time when I get on Safari kicks.

I have a personal maxim (or apothegm, to use a word I just learned) which states, “two isn’t a pattern, and three barely is”. My purpose for reminding myself of this message is the quell the natural human tendency to assume there is an underlying pattern to something when there really isn’t enough evidence to assume so.

Consider an event with two possible outcomes (formally known as a ‘Bernoulli trial’), for instance: will the weather tomorrow be hot or cold? Obviously this is a simplification of temperature, but humans do think in such simplifications. If yesterday’s weather was hot and today’s weather is hot, what do we expect tomorrow’s weather to be like? Hint: not cold. We see the first two hot days and—Aha!—(we think) we see a pattern. But does it really exist?

A useful way to get at this problem is to consider a completely random event, like the flip of a fair coin. By definition, something which is random does not have an underlying pattern, so we can compare the flip of our fair coin to events like simplified weather prediction and see how similar (or dissimilar) they are.

Let’s flip a coin twice. Here are the possible outcomes:

1. HH
2. HT
3. TH
4. TT

I’ll define the term patternness to describe an outcome has the appearance of being caused by an underlying pattern. Which outcomes exhibit patternness here? Outcomes 1 and 4. So 2 of 4, or 50%, of the trials exhibit patternness. But recall that this is a random event, so there is no underlying pattern. To synthesize, even though there is no underlying pattern, the outcomes suggest a pattern 50% of the time.

This should shed some light on the original statement that two events don’t constitute a pattern. Even if it looks like there is a pattern, the odds of there actually being one are equal to the odds of there not being one¹. We really don’t know anything at all.

Now let’s examine a series of three coin flips. Possible outcomes:

1. HHH
2. HHT
3. HTH
4. HTT
5. THH
6. THT
7. TTH
8. TTT

This time we see patternness in 2 of 8 outcomes, or 25%, of trials of our fair coin flip. Notice that we find a lot less patternness in the three coin flip. This is what we would expect; by adding more outcomes we are suppressing the influence of the coincidental, pattern-looking outcomes on our probability.

Still, if we find ourselves looking at an HHH or TTT (three-in-a-row)-style outcome in our lives, we’d do well to remember that even a completely random coin flip would produce such a “coincidence” a whole 25% of the time.

But why are we so prone to over-detect patterns? I conjecture the reason is that humans are pattern-matching machines. We’ve evolved highly-specialized cognitive equipment for the detection of patterns because identification of patterns gave our ancestors a vast advantage in the game of survival and reproduction². In fact, pattern recognition is the foundation of much (most?) learning. Pattern recognition let our ancestors know that predators were dangerous and that bitter-tasting plants were likely poisonous (e.g. hemlock). And we find that in most of these cases, over-detection of patterns is far less harmful than under-detection. In other words, it works well to err on the side of assuming the existence of a pattern because the alternative could mean death.

The perception of patterns where they really do not really exist is known as apophrenia³ (from Gk. apo- “off of or away from” +phren- “mind” +ia). Probably the most accessible instances of pattern over-detection are visual, where they are known as pareidolia. Pareidolia is the reason people see the virgin mary in a grilled cheese sandwich and Satan’s face in the smoke of the crumbling WTC towers. It’s why we can see faces and animals in cloud formations, and we can’t help but find some pattern in a Rorschach inkblot. It seems to me quite unsurprising that the most common interpretations of these abstract images seem to be faces, humans, and other animals—all of which would be important to primative human survival.

Of course the detection of these patterns does us no good if we don’t apply them. When we run across something new we cross-check it against our internal list of known patterns, and we develop a set of assumptions. Another word for this pattern application is stereotyping, a word which has unfortunately been vilified due to the existence of potentially-harmful types of stereotyping like sexism and racism. We would do well to watch how we use our words and where we place our emotional emphasis, however, because even these words might not be the real culprits. Stating that women and men differ physically is literally sexism, and that Caucasians have “white” skin is literally racism; sexual and racial prejudices are the actual concerns.

I’ve wandered far from my original topic, but in summary, always recall that you are hard-wired (wet-wired?) to find and apply patterns, and whether weather or gender is your topic, you might need to keep this mechanism in check to arrive at the right conclusion.

Footnotes

1. It’s important to point out the assumptions I’m invoking here. First off, we have considered a binary event. If we are considering rolling the same number three times in a row on a 20-sided die, or three people having the same last name, obviously the odds are vastly different and any perceived pattern is much more likely to be a true indicator of an underlying pattern. Also, I cheated and simplified the problem by only looking at cases where the existence of an underlying pattern and non-existence are equally probable. Formally we could apply Bayes Theorem and view the problem as: P(pattern | patternness) = P(patternness | pattern) * P(pattern). This means we need to factor in the likelihood of there being a pattern, but this term is probably impossible to calculate in general; instead we must make a simplifying assumption.
2. This is something of an equivilence rather than an explanation because reproductive and survival advantages are the only reasons for evolving anything.
3. This word is still rather obscure, having not made it into the OED yet. In fact, it seems to be more commonly found rendered as apophenia (sans r), but this is a misspelling based on the Greek roots. The first known usage appears to be Prof. Klaus Conrad’s 1958 work, Die beginnende Schizophrenie (where the word was spelled incorrectly). Source: Marek Shemanski’s Glossary of Perplexing Language.