One of the hardest things for a pilot to learn is how to fly without being able to see. Normally, in good weather and during the day, flying a plane is fairly intuitive. You look outside – is the sky up? The ground down? Am I aimed away from anything I wouldn't want the plane to be in? As long as the answer to those questions is yes, the amount of trouble you can be in is fairly limited.
However, the real world isn't all sunshine and visual meteorological conditions. When your eyes give out, you have to turn to the cold, mechanical logic of flight instruments. People have been flying without being able to see since the 1930s, and thousands of flights land each day using only their instruments. However, pilots need to be trained to do it, and those who aren't often die when they attempt it. VFR-into-IMC (Visual Flight Rules into Instrument Meteorological Conditions) remains "one of the most consistently lethal mistakes in all of aviation".
Kahneman writes about the Müller-Lyer illusion, that famous image with the two lines that appear to be different lengths but are actually the same. He argues that you never stop seeing the two lines as different lengths, you just learn to ignore what you see. You haven't actually fixed the broken intuition that led to the illusion, merely learned how to recognise it. The same is true of instrument flying; there are various sensory illusions you need to recognise so that you can learn to ignore them.
I've been writing these posts for something like 9 months now, and one thing I can say with complete confidence is that they take about an hour. Sometimes it's a little less, sometimes a little more, and on rare occasion I luck out and just transcribe a completely finished thought in 30 minutes, but one hour is the right prediction to make for the vast majority of circumstances. However, despite this frankly overwhelming weight of evidence, I still find myself making ridiculous optimistic guesses about how long a particular post will take. Ooh, I need to go to bed soon – maybe this one will be half an hour! Nope.
It seems like one of the hardest things for us to do is really, truly trust the numbers when they don't agree with our intuition. Like Han Solo saying "never tell me the odds!", we don't really believe that the numbers are reality and that it's our intuitions that deserve distrust. If you take million-to-one bets that just feel right, you're not going to miraculously make it through by the seat of your pants, you're just going to lose.
The skill of ignoring your intuition and trusting the data is a powerful one, and unique in some ways. Most skills involve improving yourself, but instrument flying is about learning to accept areas where you won't improve. You're never going to feel quite right pulling out of a turn, or really see those lines as the same length, and that's okay. The skill of instrument flying is learning to be humble.
There's a funny progression that happens when you're trying to fix a stubborn bug in an application. First, you look for all the obvious places something could be wrong. Second, you look for all the non-obvious places something could be wrong. Third, you look for all the places something couldn't be wrong. That last step looks a lot like a descent into madness: you're thinking things like maybe the compiler is broken but only for my program, or maybe it's solar flares, or maybe the output is correct but I have a rare psychological condition where I hallucinate the wrong result. Forget it, this is all a bunch of nonsense! Nothing makes sense! Black is white! Up is down! The universe has no clothes!
That progression seems fairly common outside of computers too. You're looking for your keys, you start off looking where you usually leave them, then places you don't usually leave them, and then you completely lose touch with reality. You start searching in places you've already looked just in case the keys are moving behind your back. You search inside the pantry cupboards even though there's absolutely zero chance your keys are in there. You begin to wonder if a burglar has snuck in and stolen only your keys from your house. You've completely lost faith in the behaviour of keys and the laws of physics in general.
But it doesn't always have to be so dramatic. In many small ways we place our trust in systems to work for us and, when they do, we take them for granted. I expect my house to continue to keep out the rain and sun, to the point where I forget that is its main job. However, a tent is a great reminder that shelter from the elements is not something to take for granted in a dwelling. When the system starts breaking down, it stops being invisible and, often, starts being annoying. My computer doesn't always do what I want, and I find this very frustrating when it happens – all the more so because it usually does what I want, but not often enough for me to trust it.
Of course, that is nothing compared to a non-expert's interactions with a computer. For a user's interactions to be meaningful, they have to consider the computer to be a system that obeys rules and has some sense of internal logic and consistency. Often, that is not what they think. Why are you clicking randomly? Why did you open up a completely different application? Why are you typing the name of your file into Google? Why? Why?! "Well, I don't know. I just tried something." And, of course, if you do not believe the system you're using makes any sense, trying one thing is just as good as another. Why not pick at random?
I mentioned earlier the importance of intention, and how the opposite of intention is just doing things whether or not they actually connect with your goals. I think there is an important parallel here: you can't act with intention in a crazy mixed-up inverse with no rules, because you have no idea what actions will lead to what outcomes. Not understanding that relationship has the same effect as not considering it at all.
Conversely, the times when a system seems to have no rules, it's often just that you haven't understood what those rules are. Like it or not, the first step towards intention and purposeful action in that universe is learning to see its clothes.
I mentioned in my last failure that I had been considering whether the flexibility of giving myself an extra day was a good or a bad thing. That was largely an experiment, and I think I've got enough data now to say it isn't helpful.
The problem is that the flexibility really just allowed minor failures to be hidden instead of exposed and dealt with. Effectively it lowered the bar so that certain failures qualified as near-misses instead. I now think that's the wrong direction to go; effective improvement requires feedback, and the shorter the feedback loop the better. Waiting until the small failures turn big enough might save face, but I don't think it helped me in the long run.
So my new commitment is simpler and stricter: a post each day by 23:59:59 UTC. Let's see how that works.
I've been thinking a bit recently about how entertainment is different from other activities. There are a lot of fun things that wouldn't necessarily qualify as entertainment: running, talking with friends, eating and so on. And there are ways that entertainment can actually be pretty hard work. Difficult video games, for example, but also some books and movies require a bit of mental firepower. So what is it that makes entertainment entertaining?
One answer that occurs to me is ego destruction: things are happening, but they're not happening to you. I see this as related to my earlier post where I argued that your analytical system 2 shouldn't have as much claim as it does to being your true self. If self-awareness is an introspective process, operated by your system 2, then it stands to reason that being self-aware would be fatiguing. Entertainment is a way to turn off that introspection by turning off your concept of self entirely.
There are other ways to switch it off too, of course, like meditation or getting into a flow state, but those are more difficult. The great thing about entertainment is that it can do this on demand. Any time you're feeling fatigued from exerting your ego, you can get engrossed in a story and give it a break for a while.
I suppose that means that a decrease in time spent consuming entertainment would need to be matched by some other ego-less activity. Dedicating more time to work would be fine, but it would need to be work you could get engrossed in and lose your sense of self, or else you'd just end up really fatigued by it. Ironically, in most cases where you're trying to change your habits, you'd tend to be more introspective and less likely to enter that state.
Perhaps that's also a good reason to cultivate being non-introspective in everyday life, to reduce the amount of fatigue it causes and reduce your reliance on recreational ego destruction to recharge.
I've noticed over the course of writing these posts that there's a certain evolutionary effect at play. Over time, I seem to have picked up some habits, dropped others, and sometimes picked up and then dropped a habit shortly after. Some of those were deliberate experiments, like my ill-fated dalliance with brevity, but mostly they just sort of happened.
But, digging into that a little further, the reason these changes have a chance to take hold is because I'm not terribly consistent with my format. Unlike a newspaper column or something where every one follows the same pattern, I seem to change things fairly frequently, even if they're minor things. This has the downside that it may not be easy to predict or rely on certain features of what I'm doing, but the upside is that this kind of constant mutation provides a fertile ground for evolutionary improvements.
And I see that tradeoff – consistency vs evolution – as a general one. Often you find comfort in things around you being predictable, like a long-running TV show, or the behaviour of an old friend. And it's certainly a virtue to be reliable and consistent, at least in many areas. But, fundamentally, if you commit to doing something a certain way, you commit to stopping its evolution. Sometimes that might seem worth it, but I wonder who can really say "this is my environment, and I'll never need to adapt to another"?
Luckily, it seems like consistency is a fundamentally difficult thing for us to achieve. I once heard that if you want to develop your own style, a good strategy is to just copy people you like. You won't be able to do it exactly, and your poor imitation of their style becomes a good representation of your own style. I also can't help but observe the strange way that we seem to stumble once in every hundred thousand steps or so, even after walking for decades. You'd think, of all things, that would be a good time to call it quits and stop iterating.
Yet we don't – or, can't – and I suspect that even today your gait is some miniscule degree more efficient than it was the day before.