Flow vs Deliberate Practice

June 15, 2013 //
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Flow and Deliberate Practice are rather popular concepts these days. This shouldn’t be surprising, as everyone wants to be fulfilled in their work and play, and many people want to become an expert in some domain. However, proponents of each approach appear to be in conflict a lot of the time. On top of that, some people think they are the same thing! I believe that they are separate but compatible: two aspects of the same consistent model.

What do we mean by “Flow”?

In an email thread among alumni of CFAR’s rationality workshops, one member commented with a few paragraphs to this effect:

What good SNS* looks like is being in a Flow state. A Flow state is a state in which you are intensely pushing yourself, to the limits of your abilities, toward a goal you are intrinsically motivated to pursue, and receiving frequent and immediate feedback on your progress.

*SNS: for a relevant discussion of the Sympathetic Nervous System, see my earlier post on Againstness Training from a few months ago.

I responded with

I do agree that good SNS looks like what’s described here. At the very least, anything that feels “intense” is almost certainly SNS, and this state you describe is clearly good.

However, I don’t believe this is flow. I think the term you’re looking for is deliberate practice. The turbocharging class/concept [taught by CFAR] is basically a framework for turning anything into deliberate practice.

The book cover for Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

A fascinating look into a very fundamental part of the psychology of happiness and life satisfaction.

What this exchange reveals, however, is the ambiguity in the word “flow”. When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did his original research, the state of balance people were finding during their work was overwhelmingly described by them as “flow”, implying that that is a good word to use for this experience of balance between skill and challenge. It appears, though, that there are false positives: experiences that are not what Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” but which other people intuitively do. This, I believe, is a key source of the confusion around deliberate practice. The satisfying nature of it and the sense of growth evoke a feeling of flowing in some people.

And so both the canonical Flow, and Deliberate Practice are both sometimes referred to as “flow”.

So what is deliberate practice?

Much as Csikszentmihalyi is the man behind Flow, there is a man behind Deliberate Practice: K Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, who has spent years studying how people become experts at something. If you’re thinking 10,000 hours, you’re right. Malcolm Gladwell popularized that idea but it has its origins in Ericsson’s research. What Ericsson discovered is that experts in a given domain have typically spent not just ten thousand hours practising relevant skills in that field, but that they’ve done that practice a certain way. Essentially it boils down to performing at a level slightly beyond what’s comfortable.

One concept from Ericsson’s work that I’m familiar with was exposed to me via Moonwalking with Einstein, a book about memory (which I summarized on actionablebooks.com). Joshua Foer, the author of Moonwalking, called it the OK Plateau, and it occurs because your brain doesn’t want to have to strain. Your brain wants to do things unconsciously, so it tries to learn them so effectively that it doesn’t have to pay attention while you do them. This is great for performance or multitasking (talking while driving, for example) but totally halts learning and improvement, hence it will not get you to expertise.

In the book, Foer has hit a plateau on his times for speed cards (memorizing the order of an entire deck of cards). Ericsson, who is coaching him, recommends he sets a metronome and tries to go just 10-20% faster than his current ability, memorizing a card each time the metronome ticks. This single intervention starts Foer on the path to improvement again, and he goes on to set a U.S. record in speed cards in his first competition.

A unified model of challenges & skills

To help distinguish between flow and deliberate practice, consider this image, which I created based on an chart in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow. Flow is described as the state that occurs when skill and challenge are perfectly balanced such that the act is neither straining nor boredom, and only occurs when you’re in the “flow channel” (white, in the diagram). Deliberate practice, on the other hand, requires challenging yourself beyond your current skill level, i.e. going into the Anxiety section (hence SNS). As this diagram illustrates (point #3) there’s a tension that occurs when that happens, forcing you to level up your skills. Obviously you don’t want to make it too challenging, or you’ll be unable to perform without mistakes, at which point you’re practising making mistakes.

Chart illustrating how flow occurs when challenge and skill are matched, but that learning is optimized when challenge is slightly greater (this is deliberate practice).

Based on an image in the original flow book. License CC BY 2.5. Click to enlarge.

I read Flow a few months ago, and many of the examples he gives are clearly not deliberate practice / learning. In fact, they’re things like rural farmers who do their work with a deep sense of presence. Sure, they’re honing their craft, but it’s not the kind of rapid-skill building that turbo-charging / deliberate practice is. It seems self-evident to me that the Flow state at 4 is much more pleasurable than the flow state at 1. This is also supported by the following model from Csikszentmihalyi’s later book, Finding Flow (which I haven’t read; I retrieved the image from Wikipedia). This suggests that deliberate practice, in addition to making your performance more effective (and therefore more valuable, etc.) will also make your performance more enjoyable.

A graph with axes of skills and challenges again, except this time containing 8 segments corresponding to combinations low-to-high skill and challenge.

A more complex flow model than the channel.

Deliberate practice is rare, because it’s hard work. People will naturally tend towards flow states, which are more enjoyable, but which make for substantially slower learning and growth. Essentially, you want to be performing in a flow state, but training using deliberate practice. Flow is when you’re playing all the way through a piece of music that’s exactly at your skill level; deliberate practice is going over bar 39 thirty-nine times to nail the complex rhythm. Ideally, you’ll probably do a bit of eat.

Flow periods may be necessary for maintaining motivation and big-picture perspective: chess masters may have spent the majority of their time reviewing grand master games, but they typically don’t give up playing games altogether during that time. The key is to find the balance that works best for you: balance between skill and challenge, and between flow and deliberate practice. The following maxim is a pretty good start though:

Practice deliberately, perform in flow

(Before, during, and essentially after writing this, I discovered several other relevant articles, listed below. They speak in some way to the same point I’m making, but I found I wanted an even more explicit relationship between the concepts. Also, in the interests of my own self-improvement and of making effective models of concepts, I would love to hear what you think about this article! Leave a comment letting me know if this makes sense, or if you think it could be improved.)

Categories Learning, Neuroplasticity, Personal Development, Rationality

YES! I noticed!

May 20, 2013 //
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This is a response to Can You Condition Yourself? on Slate Star Codex. Upon hearing about the “Propagating Urges” technique taught by CFAR, Scott was doubtful that humans could indeed successfully train themselves using operant conditioning. This is my response, which was also posted as a comment. I agree with him for some things but note that the technique has still been personally valuable to me and could be much more so.

I don’t know about big complex tasks, but I tried this once for a bad habit, and it worked impressively well. I used to pick my nose as a kid… and then I didn’t stop when I grew up. When I heard about the inner pigeon idea, I thought I’d give it a shot. Every time I noticed an inclination to reach my hand up, or that I was anywhere in the process of nose-picking, I would pump my fist and go “YES!” (this is my happy gesture-button).

You can’t stop a habit you don’t notice

The idea was to reinforce my own noticing. Since this action is generally considered gross and/or shameful, my brain generally tried to avoid thinking about it, which meant I definitely would never notice I’d done it until it was too late. By rewarding myself for noticing (whenever it happened) I taught my brain that it was a good thing to think about. When doing the opposite (cringing when noticing) we train our brain not to notice because it produces discomfort. This is likely punitive justice: it teaches people not to get caught.

I think perhaps this functions in a slightly different way than Skinner’s pigeons though. It’s almost like I’ve made a game out of noticing my brain’s urge, and I get an (uncounted) point every time I successfully do so. Regardless, this made me more aware of these urges, which meant I started noticing more and more when it was just my nose feeling itchy or my hand moving up. I would then reward myself and not bother actually doing it.

Within the first day, this almost completely eliminated the habit, although I forgot to go back for vaccines 2 and 3 so I confess that it’s not quite gone. However, during this comment I noticed once during the act, and YES’d. Then, not a minute later I noticed beforehand and YES’d again.

Noticing urges

I believe this could work for a number of these sorts of impulses, although I haven’t yet tried (upon reflection, this would be really valuable; adding near top of queue)

  • the urge to open Facebook/Twitter/HN/reddit/etc in a new tab
  • the urge to go on the internet if not already on
  • the urge to switch away from this tab where I’m writing a blog comment and go check my email (has happened twice thrice four times so far)
  • the urge to grab a snack when I’m already full
  • the urge to click on a link that is linkbaity but that I don’t anticipate actually being valuable.

Noticing thoughts

In addition to helping notice these urges, it could also be valuable for noticing thoughts to the effect of “this may not be a valuable use of my time” or “I’m doing something I don’t want to be doing”. Normally, my brain shies away from those, because if that’s true, it means I’ve been wasting my time. However, like being wrong, the only way to fix that is to admit it (to yourself, at least). This ranges from:

  • “Why am I still reading this site?”
  • “I’m not really sure what I’m getting out of this video…”
  • “This conversation/person-I’m-talking-to isn’t really very interesting…”
  • “Gah, I was going to submit that form this morning and I forgot…”

… and of course any ugh field or thought about a belief that’s generally aversive.

How to actually use this

Since there can be a fair bit of cognitive overhead to this at the start, I would recommend starting by focusing on only one type of thought or urge at a time, but it’s fun to do. I had to leave for a few hours in the middle of typing this and my attention to it while writing made it really easy to apply it to both the original unhygenic habit mentioned and also to the email-checking impulse when I came back.

Writing this post has made me realize that there’s a lot of really low-hanging fruit for me here, and so I’m going to try adding a new noticing every few days for the next while. Will report back in later this summer with results. I suspect this can work with positive urges too but I’ll look into that later.

Categories Habits, Lifehacks, Mindfulness, Personal Development, Rationality, Response

Polyphasic Sleep 2: Everyman   (Day 11)

April 12, 2013 //
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Polyphasic sleep, we meet again.

As you may know, I attempted to adapt to the rather incredible uberman sleep schedule back in summer 2011. The first half-dozen posts on this blog document that process.

When I quit uberman after about a week, I reflected about the various benefits and costs of doing it, ultimately concluding that I would not do it again. Well…

(For the sake brevity and of people who already know anything about this topic, I’m going to try to avoid explaining polyphasic itself. There is already plenty of that on the internet. If you’re confused by something, google it or comment below and I’ll explain.)

What changed?

Well, first of all, I’m not doing uberman again. I’m doing everyman (~3.3h core sleep at night plus three 20min naps). There are a few other factors that have converged to make this happen though:

  1. I met someone very awesome who does everyman, and met other people who know other successful polyphasers personally. This was really helpful because I had much more immediate evidence that this was indeed working for some people. This was the inspiration/impetus.
  2. I’m working at a software startup that has comfy memory foam mattresses and doesn’t care when I sleep. This gives me lots of flexibility, which is super-important for adaptation.
  3. polyphasicsociety.com. This website didn’t exist when I tried uberman in 2011. While various bloggers were talking about polyphasic, nobody seemed to actually know anything. This site actually provides solid recommendations and cites literature. Unfortunately there has still been virtually no direct research on the subject.
  4. I have discovered the Zeo sleep tracker. Sadly Zeo is out of business, but these are totally worth it and I’d seriously recommend trying to acquire one (eBay, Amazon) if you want to do polyphasic.
  5. I have acquired amazing nap mp3s, created (as far as I know) by Matt Fallshaw. More on these below.

The first steps of adaptation

I’m already 11 days in! Unlike my last attempt, where I decided to blog daily, I’m trying to make this one feel somewhat more normal, and therefore I don’t want to have this huge posting thing. The other part is that it everyman is more normal, because I still have a main night-time sleep. Here’s the story.

After deciding in late March that I wanted to do this, I scheduled my adaptation to start the following weekend. I was already intending to go out Saturday night clubbing, and I figured I just wouldn’t sleep afterwards. It is generally agreed among most polyphasers I’ve talked to that the best way to adapt to everyman is to pretend to adapt to uberman. Furthermore, the best way to adapt to uberman consists of sleeping every 2h instead of every 4h, which is called the naptation or exaptation. So that’s what I did.

After not sleeping since Friday night, I finally took a nap Sunday morning, and proceeded to take naps every 2h for about a day. I was pretty tired in the morning but felt quite competent in the afternoon / evening. (Sidenote on feeling competent while possibly having inadequate self-assessment abilities: I’ve started using Quantified Mind to track my cognitive performance. Unfortunately I didn’t do enough trials before starting adaption to be able to negate practice effects, but at the very least if I ever quit polyphasic or switch to a different version, even temporarily, I should be able to tell how it’s affecting my brain.)

REM naps, glorious REM naps

Then, I started cutting out some of the naps midday. Tuesday morning was crazy. I was utterly exhausted and probably would not have been able to avoid sleeping if it hadn’t been for my friend who stayed over and kept me awake by asking me random questions (and tickling me incessantly when I would doze). Even still I think I crashed a bit during while she was totally asleep. I… don’t remember. Anyway, on the advice of several other polyphasers, I decided to start my core that night. This is a cool part of the story. In my uberman conclusion post, I note under benefits:

I feel like I’m better at napping now, although that will have to be re-examined once I’m no longer sleep deprived. — past!Malcolm

In the year-and-a-half since the uberman experiment, I indeed retained my ability to REM-nap, and while I only tried it when tired, tired is a pretty common state for university students, so it came in handy plenty of times. The other cool result of this was that when I started my adaptation to everyman this month, I was REM-napping a few of my naps from the very first day, and about half of them by Tuesday. Apparently many people take much longer (including myself when I tried Uberman) but my polyphasic friends suggested that I could now add a core.

My Everyman Schedule

Radial chart indicating when I'm asleep and awake

My exact schedule. Purple is sleep, black is wake. The circle is a 24h clock with midnight at the top.

It took me a decent amount of time to figure out what schedule would work best for me, but I ultimately settled on:

  • Core: 01:30-05:00
  • Nap: 08:30-08:50
  • Nap: 13:20-13:40
  • Nap: 19:00-19:20

My core was actually originally going to be like 1:15 but the first few nights I was late anyway so I ended up keeping it at 1:30. I’ve successfully awoken every time, but after my core on nights 1 and 3 I didn’t manage to get myself out-of-bed enough and conked out for another few hours.

The Zeo and phases of sleep

During naps, my Zeo tells me how much sleep I actually got, and what kind. I can virtually always tell when I have REM naps, because I dream, but it’s not nearly as obvious how long I slept. The really good ones, though, where I REM for the whole 20mins (I’ve had I think 3 of these so far) have me wake up feeling like I’ve gone to Narnia. It seriously feels like I’ve been gone for hours, so it’s a weird adjustment to return to a world that was basically like the one I left.

For my core sleep, the Zeo has been hugely helpful in indicating my cycles and how much deep sleep I’m getting (the idea is that REM is gained mostly through naps, and deep (aka SWS / short-wave sleep) mostly during core. There were actually a couple of nights when I got an insanely large amount of deep sleep—2 hours 25 minutes! I only have 2 nights’ of monophasic Zeo data, but this appears to be a solid hour more than I was getting before.

However, I’m much more concerned about REM sleep. I appear to have been getting at least 2 hours when monophasic, which will be tough to replicate polyphasically. I might need 4 naps per day. …although I seem to recall reading that REM is more effective with smaller doses administered frequently throughout the day. Lately I’ve been adding a 10:40am nap, which seems to be very helpful and REMful (one of them was one of the solid 20mins of REM).

The sleep mp3s

Oh man, these are so awesome. Historically I’ve relied on vibrating alarms to annoy me out of bed. I still do that for my core sleep, but for almost all of my naps this time I’ve used this mp3. For length-variants and other polyphasic resources, check out the links on this lesswrong.com comment.

The track is mostly composed of waves, sohttp://blog.myzeo.com/sleep-architecture-again/ft pitched tones, and vague babble (similar to coffivity.com but without coffeeshop sounds) which is pleasant. Then, 20 minutes in, a beautiful, slow, simple synth melody starts, and plays for 2 minutes. At that point, classical guitar comes in, then seconds later piano, then an electric guitar playing rock, followed by some crazy sounds that will make you think you should probably head for cover. I struggle to imagine sleeping through this when it’s playing on headphones. Surprisingly, though, I have never needed this alarming ending. In fact, I become awake/aware almost instantly at the first synth tone. I don’t know how this works, but it feels like magic and it’s so much nicer than having to awaken to beeping, bells, or angry vibrations.

I’m just getting started

This everyman adaptation is going really well. I’ve had a few mess-ups (such as this morning when I managed to sleep for 2 hours sitting in a chair with my computer on my lap. Thank god it didn’t fall off…) but all in all I’m feeling quite confident this will work. I’m already feeling way more rested than I would expect sleeping just 30h/week. Anyway, it’s time for my core! Sweet dreams (:

Categories Everyman Sleep, Lifestyle, Polyphasic Sleep

12 Thoughts on Age, Growing Up and Birthdays

March 26, 2013 //
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Happy birthday to me. As a Canadian, one of the joys of living in San Francisco during the few months around my 21st birthday has been getting to turn legal twice. Not that I really care. Relevant thoughts:

1. I don’t feel 21.

I don’t really feel any age. Before telling people my age, I usually get them to guess, and the typical answer is about 25. Since many of my peers/friends are 25 or older I don’t mind this, and projecting as older probably helps me gain some respect. I know some people who feel like they’re a certain age, whether older, younger, or equal to their actual age, but age just feels really arbitrary to me.

2. I used to think that age-closeness was important for relating to people.

I no longer think that. Probably since I’ve had some friends who are much older than me (in one case half a century) and I’ve started interacting a lot more with mixed-age groups. Also flirting.

The other half of this is that I’ve realized that I sometimes have difficulty relating to some people who are my age.

3. I sometimes still get surprised that I’m a responsible adult.

I periodically feel impressed with myself when I’m able to do things like navigate airports between countries, or have a job, or maintain a schedule that involves meeting people for coffee. I’m not sure why these things make me feel like this, since they aren’t actually that complicated compared to e.g. multivariable calculus. Or empathy.

4. I don’t learn as much as I think I’m going to learn.

I find myself often thinking “Wow, this will change my life!” or thinking that an idea has profoundly affected the way I think. This causes me to look back at musings of past-me and be astonished with how much I knew so long ago… since I assume that I’ve learned so many important things this past year, clearly I was an ignorant fool a year ago. Except apparently not.

5. I learn more than I feel I’m learning.

Sometimes I feel like I’m just going through motions and chasing ideas and emptying my email inbox, but then I’ll be talking to someone who hasn’t had the same experiences I’ve had and they’ll practically start taking notes. At this point, I realize that I’ve actually synthesized a lot of interesting stuff during this time.

6. It’s often not obvious which new things are really going to stick.

This point is essentially the net point of the previous two. This realization emerged from my spreadsheet of all the books I’ve read since summer ’11. I looked back at my notes on some of Seth Godin’s books and the notes suggested my life had been profoundly changed by reading them. Months later, I barely remember what Poke the Box is about. These books inspired me, but didn’t actually change my behaviour or even my thought patterns.

7. How I feel about myself is independent of what I’ve learned.

Sort of. It’s related, but they’re not the same. I seem to feel mostly the same about myself regardless of the facts in my head. Even when I learn new models or frameworks, or ways of approaching things, they rarely have a substantial effect on my self-conception. The main things that do are ones that actually relate to relating. Any time I feel like I’ve learned to connect with people better I expand my comfort zone in certain situations and this is a really good feeling.

8. Awkwardness isn’t necessary.

I’ve recently been realizing that awkwardness often arises from the feeling that something is supposed to be awkward. If you give up the assumption that an experience or interaction will be awkward, often it simply isn’t. Often it’s just fun, or pleasant, or profound instead.

9. Time is arbitrary.

There are a lot of factors that affect the sensation of the passage of time. The main one for me is tiredness. Time passes much faster late at night. I’d like to figure out ways to hack this so that I can experience more.

Something similar happens on a days-months scale too: the experience of yesterday feeling like last week but months ago feeling like yesterday. My current theory is that doing lots of interesting (and varied) things makes time feel like it’s passing quickly because there’s always something going on, but when you look back things are stretched out forever because there are so many details.

10. Age is arbitrary.

People all age at a rate of 60 seconds per minute, but the variance in amount and type of experiences is so broad that age makes a very poor proxy for what someone is like. I mean, guess it’s the best one we have, but like, some people could be safely drinking at age 16 (not too much, of course) whereas others can’t even in adulthood. But anyway…

11. Alcohol is overrated.

Now, when I’m drinking, I tend to think alcohol is underrated, but I trust sober!me’s opinion more. People make a really big deal about it but for me these months of being 20 in the USA have been more annoying for lack-of-ability-to-go-dancing than lack-of-ethanol-in-my-bloodstream. In fact, I’d consider going off alcohol entirely if that wouldn’t seriously restrict my drink options. I like to try new things, and most drinks appear to be booze.

12. Promises to yourself are complicated.

One night, when I was 15, I made a vow to myself that I would never do “drugs”. I clarified at the time that this didn’t include alcohol or caffeine, but implicitly included pretty much everything else except prescription drugs or the odd painkiller. My main reasoning was that I, at the time, felt infinitely happy. That is, I didn’t feel like I could possibly feel happier, and therefore there was no need to pursue artificial highs.

For years, this has given me an easy way to refuse an offered smoke of any kind, but I’ve lately come to realize that the original argument doesn’t apply to some places where I’m applying the rule. Nootropics are the main thing in this category. I have other reasons to be wary of them, but nonetheless, I’m realizing that my cached response (“no drugs!”) is not quite sufficient. That’s a much bigger topic… I just wanted to note how it’s both hard and easy to justify breaking a promise to yourself.

 

I had originally intended to write 21 thoughts, but this prompt only produced 12. Oh well, it’s the same digits. I won’t be able to cheat next year ;)

Oh, bonus thought:

This is the first time in a few years that I’ve set my birthday to public on Facebook. I might decide to have another one in a few months, just for fun.

Categories Uncategorized

My Songwriting is On Fire

March 15, 2013 //
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An image of a hot air balloon, its flame glowing in the dark scene.

The song isn’t actually about hot air balloons… right?

A month ago, a friend and I decided that we’d write a song each month with a preset title. This is kind of like Songfight, but I find that a month actually gives me time to flesh out a full idea rather than just scraping something together in a couple hours. This is my song for month one, “On Fire”.


My reflection above about hours versus months is interesting, because it reflects a recent (past year) shift in the way I write songs.

  • I get a snippet of a song… typically a single phrase with a melody or a couple phrases that rhyme. Note that at this point I rarely know what I actually want to sing about.
  • I frantically search for a piece of paper and a pencil.
  • I literally write the song, line by line, singing the lines aloud as I go.
  • I reword a few phrases and rearrange a few lines.
  • Within an hour or two, the song is basically finished, aside from instrumentation which I almost always do later.

I’ve since… changed. Now it’s more like this:

  • I get an inkling or idea for a song… often a snippet like above but in this case just the title “on fire”.
  • I sing it. I sing it again, a bit differently.
  • I try out another line to follow the first.
  • I iterate over the verse or chorus or whatever, ironing out kinks and adding flairs like alliteration and internal rhyme.
  • I do something else. Unlike before, where almost all of my songs were written completely the day they were first conceived, I now write songs intermittently, often while walking around.
  • I return to the song, ultimately finalizing it. At this point, I still may not have written anything down yet.

The first song I wrote this way was General Disregard , which is on my album. If you’re familiar with the rest of the album you might notice that General Disregard feels more casual and less structured than the other tunes.

I’m a poet and I know it

I’ve been a poet for at least as long as I’ve been a songwriter, and I’ve long considered myself a poet first and musician second (this is related to the fact that I invariably do the words before the instrumentation). The poems I used to write were very structured: limericks, sonnets, or even just rhyming couplets with a strict meter. I haven’t totally ditched these but I’ve gotten more involved with slam poetry, which uses a lot more internal rhyme and stretching of beats, and I’ve also started casually freestyle rapping. Both of these have contributed to my new strategy for songwriting.

In fact, when I first started doing slam, I would create my poems like I used to write my songs. This is just simply the wrong medium. It’s like designing a painting using your sense of smell. Murmuring and writing are a really poor way of creating something that’s ultimately going to be performed. Similarly, I find I can work a lot faster and with way more nuance when I’m creating songs aloud and in my head versus on paper. It takes energy and intent to erase something from paper, while it takes effort to keep something in my head. This means that if a part is cumbersome or boring, it gets forgotten, and I have to replace it with something catchier.

The mental process of composition

I’ve learned a bit about the memory recently from reading Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer (read my summary at actionablebooks.com) and one key point that emerged was that the memory regularly drops details and adds others every time the memory is accessed. For my songwriting, this means that every time I want to work on a song in-progress, I get to massage it on the way out, rather than just turning text into sound.

I’ve also realized that writing the songs in my head is a real mental exercise! In another song I’ve been working on I found I had to stop because my brain was getting worn out. This saturation is a good sign, because it means both that my unconscious brain will continue working on it even once I move on, and that my mental capacity for this will expand. Neuroplasticity!

After my album launch last fall, I unintentionally took an almost complete hiatus from songwriting for nearly 3 months. Then I decided in February I wanted to write more songs. Now I have 1¾ songs since then, and I’m really excited to start sharing them again. Much of this will probably be posted here, but if you want my really musical news you can also subscribe to the Maleidoscope newsletter at maleidoscope.com.

Categories Maleidoscope, Music, Neuroplasticity, Songwriting

On the Unsuitableness of “IF” and the Intricacies of “BUT”

February 28, 2013 //
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A short reflection on two even shorter words.

Don’t use “if” if…

The other day, I was reading the details of various phone services while logged into my carrier’s website. I came across a section that read:

Long distance charges apply if you don’t have an unlimited nationwide feature.

…so I’m like “Wait? Do I have an unlimited nationwide feature?” and it occurs to me that there was no reason for them to use the word “if” there. I’m logged in! Their system knows the answer to the if question and should simply provide the result instead of forcing me to figure out if I qualify.

Since you asked…

In some cases, of course, it might be valuable to let the user know that the result hinges on the state of things, but there’s an alternative to “if”. It’s called “since”. So that page, instead of what it said, should have been something more like:

Long distance charges would apply, but they don’t since you have an unlimited nationwide feature.

or

Long distance charges apply since you don’t have an unlimited nationwide feature. Upgrade now

I was initially going to just talk about software, but this actually applies to any kind of service, including one made of flesh and smiles. The keystone of service is anticipation. A good system will anticipate what the user needs/wants and will provide it as available. This means not saying “if” when the if statement in question can be evaluated by the server (machine or human) instead.

How to arrange your “but”

Framing is important. There are many other examples of this (in fact, I’m in the process of compiling a list of helpful ways to reframe things) but here’s a simple one. It relates to the word “but”. Specifically, to the order of the two clauses attached to the “but”. The example that prompted me to jot this idea down was deciding which of the following to write in my journal:

  • Wrecking my productivity, but it’s an awesome book.
  • Awesome book, but it’s wrecking my productivity.

As is readily apparent, the second part becomes the dominant or conclusive statement as it gets the final word against the first statement. In this case, I opted in the end to use the former option, because it affirms the value of reading the book rather than suggesting it’s not worth it in the long run. The book in question is a now-finished serial ebook called The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin, and the sentences above should give you an adequate warning/recommendation not to read it.

This bit about the buts is obvious in hindsight, but I found that laying it out explicitly like this helped me start noticing it a lot more and therefore reframing both my thoughts and my communication.

And yet…

Say you want to express to a cook both your enjoyment of a meal and your surprise at its spiciness, there are several options:

  • I really enjoyed this, but it was spicier than I expected.”
  • This was spicier than I expected, but I really enjoyed it.”

…but, maybe the extra spiciness didn’t detract from the enjoyment. In that case, a better conjunction would be “and”. Again, like before, this sounds obvious, but once consciously aware of it I started catching myself saying “but” in places that didn’t adequately capture what I wanted to say or in some cases were rude. The chef remark above has the potential to be rude, for example.

If you want to add to the reframing list, comment below or shoot me an email at malcolm@[thisdomain].

Categories Coding, Conversation, Design, Interface, Language

Winning at Arguments by Enlarging your PNS

February 10, 2013 //
3

Here’s a video of me. It might be helpful to read the text below before watching the video. Actually, on second thought, this post was adapted from an email to a friend who said “I am grinning ear to ear from watching the video on your wall. I’d love to hear more about it!” so maybe watch it first. Your call.

The Autonomic Brain & Againstness

So, in late January I was at a 4 day Applied Rationality workshop, which was absolutely amazing. The first 3 days were classes, and the 4th was to practise what we’d learned already. That’s when this video happened. The relevant class is called Againstness, and the practice session is fondly referred to as “Torture Court.” The againstness class is about the two halves of the Autonomic Nervous System (the part of your brain you don’t consciously control directly) which are the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems.

  • SNS = fight + flight + freeze (stress/againstness)
  • PNS = rest & digestion + (empathy)

The idea is that while againstness (or SNS domanance) was effective back when stress = wild animal or armed opponent, it isn’t when stress = fight-with-your-partner or performance anxiety. As mentioned, you don’t have a sense of empathy when you’re in that state, so it’s basically impossible to consider that the other person might be right, or to even think of how the situation might be resolved peacefully. We were taught several techniques to release from againstness and shift to PNS dominance… basically:

  1. Be grateful for the chance to practise this skill (gratitude is incompatible with SNS)
  2. Relax your body and open it up to expose your organs (body gestures like crossed arms are both symptomatic of againstness and reinforce SNS-dominance)
  3. Actively try to feel the situation from the other perspective, or feel a sense of connection to the other person.
  4. (repeat as necessary. if gratitude for the chance doesn’t work, be grateful that the chance is so tough that it’s beyond your ability to be grateful for it!)

Astrology & Arguments

Then. We come to the question of how exactly I came to be standing up there freaking out about astrology. I’ve historically not really liked astrology, but I was mostly indifferent. Sometime (I’m not sure where) in the past few years I developed a deep frustration with it. It really hit a peak this past summer when I had a very heated argument about it with my partner at the time. This had come up with past partners as well, although not so intense. Anyway, in another class at the workshop, called Winning at Arguments, we were asked to think of a heated argument, so I thought of that one. We looked into the word “winning” and how it can mean a variety of things, but that the most useful definition is that both (all) people involved achieve their goals. The next step there was to pause and think “what is my goal? what is their goal?” and I realized that ultimately she was trying to understand me and I was trying to be understood. Pretty compatible, eh? And yet it was one of the most intense arguments I’ve ever had.

However, despite having that understanding on Sunday, there was still a lot of pent-up negativity surrounding the subject of astrology. Very silly. Like, no matter how much I ultimately dislike it, there is nothing to be gained by being angry or stressed about it. Hence, the torture court exercise. I was one of the last people to go from our group, and a lot of the other people had been doing pretty tame things like singing I’m a Little Teapot—the main source of stress there was uncertainty surrounding the lyrics, not fear of performing. Another participant had to sidestep a punch from Val (the male instructor you can hear) but do so without flinching—just moving relaxedly. A lot of this is actually related to Aikido, but that’s another topic.

Torture and Laughter

The other instructor running the Torture Court was Cat, who was also the one who did the arguments class, so when I finally went up I had this anticipation (a scary but hopeful one) that it would be astrology-related. If it had come up as something else that was boring, actually, I would have suggested it be revised as such. Anyway, I had given my phone to a friend to film me, and so then Cat proposed what she did and man it was overwhelming! One of the profound realizations I had was that I use laughter as a stress response. Like, I sort of knew this, but I didn’t realize how obvious and dramatic it was. Where others became frozen or defensive, I became, well, as you see in the video.

Immediately following the session I was walking around in a very intense physical, emotional, and mental state. My body felt… kind of tingly. I was feeling totally drained but simultaneously full of life. It was kind of like being dizzy but I wasn’t off-balance. This lasted maybe 10-15 minutes. It has, however, substantially reduced my aversion to astrology. Again, I still don’t care for it, but it doesn’t get me worked up anymore. At least, it hasn’t yet.

Malcolm, the Aries

Categories Conversation, Mindfulness, Neuroplasticity, Personal Development, Rationality, Video

The Meta-Application of Rationality

February 1, 2013 //
0

Last weekend, I had the great pleasure of being able to attend an Applied Rationality workshop held in Berkeley, CA. I can say without a doubt that it has had a serious effect on the trajectory of my life. I want to talk briefly about this more specifically. I do have much more to say about the workshop when I get a chance, and I’d love to talk about it either privately or in the comments.

So, my life’s trajectory: those familiar with calculus will understand the following in terms of derivatives, but I’m going to use the analogy of a moving vehicle. If you want to describe the vehicle, you can talk about several things. The most obvious (and most immediately useful) is “where is it?” which often called displacement. The next most obvious/useful is “how fast is it going and in which direction?” also known as the car’s velocity. But, unless a wall or gas shortage stops the car before the relevant moment, the most useful thing to know about a car is how far down the gas pedal or brake is. This is the acceleration and ultimately it will tell you a lot more about how far the car will have gone by tomorrow than the velocity or displacement. You need to know roughly where the car was and how fast it started, but smaller changes in acceleration are much more important.

At the rationality workshop, I learned some things that definitely took me beyond where I’d been before (displacement / location). While at the workshop, I was definitely growing faster than usual, but right now I might be slower than usual as I focus on consolidating everything. Here’s why I’m not worried: what I definitely increased was my ability and propensity to assess how fast I’m going and to go faster still. Have a look at the chart to the right:

A chart demonstrating how much faster an exponential function increases than either a linear or polynomial function

Ideally, you want to be the yellow line on top.

Accelerating returns

It should be clear that the yellow line on the top is increasing much faster than the others. It begins just as slow, but because it’s not only getting faster but getting faster faster, it quickly takes the lead. This is the model I’m adopting. Short-term, it’s fine if my displacement and velocity are taking a hit. In the long run, by getting better at getting better (by applying my rationality skills to becoming even more rational) I can easily overtake my hypothetical other-self and never look back.

However, I’d like to think that I haven’t just increased my acceleration but that I’m increasing the rate at which I’m increasing my acceleration, and increasing that rate as well, and so on indefinitely. This resembles an exponential function, which is shown by the yellow line above. If I were just accelerating at a constant rate, I’d be the red line in the middle, and if I were just holding steady at a certain speed I’d be the shallow blue line. One fascinating principal is that no matter how many layers you do this acceleration like xbigNumber, the exponential curve always has more. That means that if I were to ask “who will win the race?” between x1234567890 and ex, then ex will always win as time goes on. I plan to do the same.

How?

How am I going to do this? I have some general thoughts on this which involve developing personal scaffolds that will make it easier to install what I learned at the workshop as habits, but I’ve modified my environment as well. Or rather, I’ve decided to put myself into a different environment. I’m working at a software startup in San Francisco right now, but rather than live in SF I’ve decided to spend the next 3 months living in Berkeley. This will make me much more likely to attend various free training events held by CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality, who ran this workshop) and will also make it easier for me to hang out with some of the people I met at the workshop, encouraging me to focus on these various aspects of my life. By investing the time and effort now to make my next 3 months more fruitful, I hope to ultimately set up self-reflection habits that are exponentially powerful. I’m not sure how I’d tell success from a close approximation, but honestly I think that if I get the first 5 or so layers than there really isn’t much to be gained at that stage.

I was surprised by the variety of rational techniques that were relevant to my decision to live in Berkeley rather than SF. They included not only a substantial consideration of my preferences and goals, but also a recognition of how I’m not as rational as I’d hypothetically like to be, and therefore I can predict that if I’m living in SF I won’t go to as much CFAR stuff. Similarly, while I might generally enjoy not having a 1h-each-way bus commute, I expect to be able to devote a lot of that time to this work, where previously I felt like there was a bit of imbalance such that most of my waking hours were directed towards working on things for the company I’m at. Then, when deciding if I wanted to accept a certain sublet option, I also weighed factors like, “how much more valuable of a place do I expect to get by waiting / more effort, and is it worth it?” I decided it wasn’t, so I accepted. Personal happiness is hard to judge, but we do our best.

One could also consider a function of personal utility. Again, I expect to slow down briefly but ultimately go so much faster/further. This is fairly easy to measure but very hard to judge cross-domain.

What’s a moment that not just changed your life, but changed how you approach it?

Categories Habits, Life, Personal Development, Rationality, Reflections, Uncategorized

Introducing FileKicker 3: New features and new possibilities

January 7, 2013 //
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I have a super-exciting announcement to make today. It’s likely exciting to some of my users who will be able to send files over Kik Messenger faster than ever, but the reason it’s so exciting for me is that it’s my first major passive income project. Over the past year, FileKicker has grown from a few hundred downloads and a dozen daily users to over 350,000 downloads and 14,000 events per day (!).

As such, I’ve spent the last few months overhauling it, adding advertisements and new features. I can’t really know until after I’ve launched it, but I’m expecting this to provide a decent amount of money to help support my tuition. Frustratingly, this has taken a lot longer than anticipated (five months instead of one) and it’s not even as much as I wanted to release.

Finally, at the advice of my friend Yev Chertov (you should check out his app re:me if you’ve ever forgotten to respond to an important text) I decided to polish off and launch what I have. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to finish the upgrade—that is, launch a paid version of the app with more features—this winter, but it’s hard to say.

Shoutout also to Scott Greenlay, who made a whole set of shiny file-type icons for this update. Click on his APK icon below to check out FileKicker 3.0.

A file icon for an Android installer

If you’re a FileKicker user, let me know in the comments what you think of it. Have any suggestions or feature requests? They may not be possible, but I’m more than game to listen.

Categories Android, Lifestyle

2012: A Year of Projects

December 31, 2012 //
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The year ends. 366 days. 527,040 minutes. (Leap-years always have the worst RENT.) As I thought about how I might measure this year, the word that came to mind was “projects”. My year entailed a large quantity and wide variety of projects, that I’d like to reflect on.

The Mind I’m Lost Inside – the album project


I’ve wanted to record an album for years. In fact, I even vowed in 2010 that I would, but it didn’t happen for a variety of reasons—mainly lack of commitment. Fall of 2011, I bought Seth Godin & Zig Ziglar’s Pick Four, a workbook for completing goals. When I bought it, I knew one of my goals would be to create an album. I didn’t know what the other three would be, but in mid-February I finally committed to them (album, mindfulness, startup, fitness) and starting working every day to reach them.

This was new for me, for music. Never before had I actively practised guitar daily. I also hadn’t seriously taken a second look at my songs to revise them. Over the course of the year, in addition to practising, I also got in touch with a bunch of people to help me, most notably Brixton Music, a studio in Kitchener. While I thought I was getting in touch early (March, for an album to be ready by the end of the year) it turned out there was no time to lose! Originally I had thought maybe I’d just do vocals and guitar because I wouldn’t have time to record other instruments. This seems like a silly idea in retrospect, because the arrangement process was really fun and the resulting sound has so much more depth.

I learned a lot from recording the album. One big thing was: when I put my mind to it, I have the stick-to-it-iveness necessary to get big projects done. While I would have asserted so beforehand, now I know so. I also learned that sometimes being naïve can be helpful: had I known how much effort (and money) it would take to make the album when I started, I probably would have been too scared, or at least too overwhelmed. It wasn’t just the total amount of time invested (approximately 300-400 hours) but the fact that I had to make progress nearly every day and then also sometimes for entire weekends.

It may take me awhile to make back all of the money I spent on studio time and production, but I’ve already made it back in experiential value.

thinkfree.ly – a startup project

In both Winter and Fall 2012, I lived in a residence startup incubator called VeloCity, and in January I teamed up with Scott Greenlay and Jinny Kim to work on a project called thinkfree.ly (this was my third Pick4 goal). Our goal was to create a web application to replace the whiteboard for ideation, wireframing, and layouts. We made a decent prototype that allows people to collaborate in real-time, kind of like a free-form and infinite version of Google Docs, and we were finalists in the VeloCity Venture Fund. At the end of term, though, we all had other jobs for the summer, in different locations, so the project went on temporary and then permanent hiatus.

I learned a bunch about front-end and back-end web development from this (jQuery and Node.js) as well as about JavaScript in general. I also got more accustomed to doing development in a small team (2). It was great to have an outlet for what I was learning about startups from living at VeloCity. However, at some point I realized that none of our team was really committed to making a company from our project and we mostly just wanted the software to exist so we could use it. There’s nothing wrong with this, inherently, but it was a great lesson in how people working on a project can have goals that are different than the official goal of the project, and also (although not in this case) different from each other. This speaks to the need for honest, open, and frequent communication among members of a team.

Bienvenue à Ma Vie – a relationship project

One of the reasons I chose to measure 2012 in projects is that my romantic relationship this summer was considered to be a project by myself and my partner. This model was new to me, but felt right: I don’t believe in soul mates, but rather I prefer the idea of working together with someone to make something beautiful; to make your lives more beautiful.

I learned a bunch of French from this relationship with a francophone. I also learned a bit about English. More importantly, I learned a lot about myself. I realized partway through the relationship that I was just going along with it but didn’t really want to be in it. I was in denial: I kept trying to convince myself that the relationship had merits—which it did—but that didn’t change the fact that it didn’t feel right. I grew as a person when I finally owned up to this, and then later this year I had the chance to stop a similar situation from occurring, and did so. I didn’t handle it perfectly, but I’m making progress.

FileKicker – a passive income project

With thinkfree.ly inactive in May, I decided that I wanted to focus my efforts on Android development, specifically for the purpose of making passive income. Initially, this was going to be making an app for the game Rejection Therapy but there were issues with this and I ended up pursuing an update to FileKicker instead. I made FileKicker back in 2010 to test Kik Messenger’s API, but in the year since it had grown to 10,000 daily uses, and so I thought I’d monetize it.

Unfortunately, and frankly quite embarrassingly, this still isn’t done. [Edit: now it is!] I expect to have it done this week, though I’ve been saying that for months now (in some cases this wasn’t quite my fault). One of the most frustrating parts of this is that I’ve missed out on probably several hundred dollars of advertising revenue over these months of not releasing the update. This makes me feel like maybe I should have made a bet with a friend that I’d get it launched by X date or pay them $100. This would take advantage of Loss Aversion Bias and also would have prevented me from just pushing it back by a day or a week, every day, for months. (Did you know that “procrastinate” literally means “put off until tomorrow”? If you’re an overachiever, try “perendinate”, which means “put off until the day after tomorrow”.)

Honestly, while that works for something like an essay (I actually did this summer for a scholarship essay, figuring $100 was a reasonable downpayment on a $1500 scholarship) it really doesn’t work for software development, for two reasons. 1: Once you’ve done the research, writing an essay is fairly straightforward and just takes time, unlike software development where many hitches can emerge (as they did). 2: A rough draft can be edited for grammar and flow and end up as a decent paper, but debugging a piece of software is not nearly as simple as copyediting. So I learned a lot about the software development process and the utter impossibility of estimating how long something will take.

Journalling – a personal project

In fall 2011 I started journalling every night, but eventually this started wreaking havoc on my social life because it took up so much time, so I stopped. I missed it though, so shortly before commencing Pick Four I took a new approach: I signed up for a web service called iDoneThis which emails me every day to ask what I did that day. So far, I’ve responded to nearly every one, often going weeks straight. I learned that (like any other habit) it’s easiest to write in a nightly journal when it’s part of a routine. This means that on the days when you break from your routine—either because things have gone horribly wrong or because you’re engaging in intentional chaos like travelling or visiting strangers—you’re less likely to write in your journal. For most habits, this is an easy trade-off to make, but it’s frustrating for me because it means that some of my most interesting days aren’t captured in my journal.

At first, I responded to the iDT emails just with a list of “dones”, but as time went on I started adding more and more reflection to them. In general, this wasn’t a bad thing, but like before it started to substantially drain my time. Finally, during a termly (each 4 months) reflection, I decided to revamp my nightly journals so that rather than just rambling or being like “today was a good day, but not as productive as I’d hoped” (most days) I would simply answer a random question chosen from a short list, write a TIL, and state what I’ve done towards each goal. More on this in a future post about journalling. By shortening the journal, I found it a lot easier to get to bed at a reasonable hour, although sometimes I can’t resist reflecting a bit. I’m sure my journal will evolve further over 2013, but I’m proud to say that it’s now fairly stable.

So there’s 2012: A Year of Projects. There are other, smaller projects, but this article is long enough already!

2013: A Year of Text

When thinking about 2013, I realized that one thing that I hope/anticipate is that it will involve a lot more reading and writing than past years. I have a plan to read a book every week. I’ve also joined the Actionable Book Club, which will involve writing an actionable summary of a book every month. I’m planning to post to this blog more often as well. (I hereby officially commit to at least twice per month.) I’ll also be learning to speed-read and active-read, and hopefully writing more songs now that my musical efforts aren’t so much focused on polishing and producing the songs I’ve already written. Words words words!

Categories Uncategorized
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