Category Archives: Philosophy

That's the work / productivity philosophy of Cal Newport. He targets it to students but all should consider it:

Qualifying questions with "at the meta-level" means that the answer should be quite general in its implications.

You might ask me after I returned from Switzerland the other week, "What did you learn at the meta-level?"

A wrong answer is: "Zurich is a pretty city."

A possible answer is: "National pride is unaffected by the health of the economy." Or: "56 percent of the value of a trip is in the memories, not the actual travel."

Asking people what they learned from an experience is always illuminating. It tests how reflective they are (do they even ask themselves this question?), whether they are able to abstract general lessons from a specific experience (that is, answer at the meta-level), and whether they can separate out and discount the lessons rooted in unique circumstances (the lessons not generalizable).

(Hat tip Tyler Cowen, in an email, for this insight and the travel example above.)

Four months ago I wrote a post titled In Praise of Feeling Utterly Confused. I said confusion, self-doubt, feeling like you're treading just above water, deep uncertainties about things others seem so certain about: this is part of life, or at least part my life.

Andrew Sullivan has a thoughtful meditation on this topic on his blog. He reflects upon his internal angst and confusion by noting the failure of some of his most cherished institutions: the Catholic church, conservatism, and America.

After describing how those institutions have failed him, he ends:

Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it's a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.

Where to go? What to do? You read me flounder every day; and you can find many less conflicted bloggers to read. Maybe I should take a break and live a less examined life for a while. Or maybe I should do what I am still doing: trying to make sense of where I belong, stay praying in a church that has sealed itself off from modernity, cling to a conservatism that begins to feel like a form of solipsism, hang on in the hope that America can reform itself and repair the world a little. I think, in fact, that this is obviously the right and only serious choice. Life is always a temporary and losing battle, an engagement with the deadliness of doing. It just feels deadlier than usual in these past few years of brutally unsentimental education.

Or maybe I should laugh more.

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

I think there's some truth to the idea that "everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it."

As Martin Buber said, "The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable."

Leah Hager Cohen is a talented writer who I first discovered via her reviews in the New York Times Book Review. Her semi-frequent dispatches on her blog, Love as a Found Object, often cause me to pause and think. In her latest post she relays a story from her adolescence to make a point about the hunt for identity and authenticity, a familiar process for anyone "poised between childhood and adulthood." The two best paragraphs below:

Whether or not you enjoy the company of reflective teens and young adults depends a lot on how stimulating you find this stage of life and the broad experimentation that Cohen points out. To retain sanity as a professor, for example, you must find thrill in engaging a constituency (students) doing all the above and more, if you're lucky, as they're also indulging intellectual enthusiasms: Nietzsche! Locke! Burke! Every day is a new hero, which is great except that appreciative hero-worship demands more than staccato attention.

Myself, when not engaged in my own exploring and confused wonderings along these lines, I tend to most enjoy people a few notches beyond this stage (age and stage are not always connected) where the sand beneath your feet is firmer not because you've answered all these questions or resolved all these self-doubts, but because the earnest, anxious, important, falsely urgent, and somewhat trite quest to "find yourself" and "figure out what I'm going to do with my life" has been replaced by a longer range view, one familiar with the real opportunities to reinvent yourself and your career over a lifetime, the surprising benefits of shade over light in some situations (ie, the joys of not knowing certain parts of you, the future, the world, etc), an appreciation for the permanence and fluidity of identity, and, bottom line, the acceptableness of "I don't know" to any number of meaty philosophical or practical questions.

High functioning people tend to be very good at pattern recognition: they accumulate lots of experiences (pieces of pattern) and then synthesize them (whole pattern) into something meaningful or actionable.

Some people are particularly good at seeing patterns in lines of code. Others are good at seeing patterns in human behavior, or in architecture, or in the way tennis balls fly over the net.

Accumulating lots of random experiences isn’t enough. The experiences need to be concentrated / focused. An early-stage VC needs to have seen a lot of early stage tech companies, for example, not just companies in general. Second, once you have a bag full of concentrated experiences, you still need to make sense of them and spot patterns. Probably the most important skill in this respect is being able to identify experiences that are generalizable versus experiences are that are to be discounted as anomalous.

Here’s the complicating factor: at an elite level experience-synthesis happens sub-consciously. A pro tennis player has hit the ball so many times that he doesn’t actively think about moving his arm and smacking the ball with racket. A premier venture capitalist has seen so many companies that he can match in his head 10 elements of New Co X to 10 analogous elements in 10 other companies — but he won’t always be able to explain this process in words. A yay or nay response on an entrepreneur pitch gets explained as a “gut feeling.”

Perhaps the most famous example of sub-conscious synthesis is when radiologists look at x-rays and try to figure out whether a patient has cancer. Apparently, the best way to be able to reliably predict cancerous x-rays is to look at thousands of x-rays marked cancer or no-cancer. Over time, you develop an intuitive sense of what’s cancerous. There are no rules or formulas. You can’t always explain your reasoning. You just know.

Sub-conscious synthesis creates problems when trying to understand how the elites did something. We listen anxiously to venture capitalists explaining how they knew Yahoo and Google were going to be winners or to Lance Armstrong explaining how he won a race, but their comments are almost always banal and not very useful. Their level of synthesis (true experts) is so deep they cannot helpfully explain what’s going on in their head to others.

It’s why some of the best advice-givers tend themselves not to be in the top 1% of whatever it is they offer advice on.

It’s why the post-game analysis by the chubby broadcaster who was only a mediocre player in his day is nine times out of ten more rewarding than the post-game interview with the star player of the game.