Robin's Interesting Thoughts

It’s interesting that everyone seems to be unhappy with the “mainstream media”. Those “on the left” tend to feel that the pursuit of “unbiased” reporting is lending credibility to candidates and stories that simply aren’t credible. Meanwhile, those “on the right” tend to believe that the pursuit of “the facts” is at best a distraction from what they care about, and at worst an elaborate scheme to cover up elitist conspiracies.

Is it possible for the media to address these concerns without going out of business or fragmenting into the “echo chambers” we are now seeing of special-interest news feeds that are not helping anyone to understand each other better?

• Can journalists acknowledge that everyone is biased, and therefore that pretending to be truly unbiased is inauthentic?
• Can scientists acknowledge that all facts are human creations, and as such are inherently prone to some uncertainty?
• Can religious leaders acknowledge that all scripture requires human interpretation, and as such is also inherently prone to some uncertainty?
• Can laypeople acknowledge that some important truths are difficult or impossible to understand without years of training and effort?
• Can politicians acknowledge that they, like all people, have made devastating mistakes?

In short, how do we present the news of the day authentically, humbly, and realistically? (How would Jesus, or the Buddha, report the news?)

 

“Begin by drawing on the warmth of friendship that you know exists potentially in your mind and direct it to yourself. Notice how much peace, happiness, and benevolence you possess already. Make yourself aware of how much you need and long for loving friendship.

“Next, become conscious of your anger, fear, and anxiety. Look deeply into the seeds of rage within yourself. Bring to mind some of your past suffering. You long to be free of this pain, so try gently to put aside your current irritations, frustrations, and worries and feel compassion for your conflicted, struggling self.

“Then bring your capacity for joy to the surface and take conscious pleasure in things we all tend to take for granted: good health, family, friends, work, and life’s tiny pleasures.

“Finally, look at yourself with upeksha (“even-mindedness, non-attachment“). You have failings, but so does everybody else. You also have talents and, like every other being on the planet, you deserve compassion, joy, and friendship.”

-Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (p. 85-86)

“Meditation… is a discipline that helps us to take greater control of our minds and channel our destructive impulses creatively.”

-Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (p.84)

I’m deeply excited about the future of self-managed organizations, but I’m uneasy about the way some of these organizations are undergoing the transition. Perhaps this is captured in the opening paragraph of an article from The Atlantic: “This spring, by order of the CEO, Tony Hsieh, the company abolished managers, eliminated job titles, denounced its own organizational hierarchy, and vested all authority in a 10,000-word constitution….”

There’s clearly something ironic about abolishing managers “by order of the CEO.” In the old system, of course, the CEO did have the power to declare such a change. But to begin a glorious new era of empowered employees by commanding it? That feels to me like a dangerous precedent, and a recipe for all the sorts of problems that self-management is intended to solve.

I realize that this sort of transition is going to be difficult no matter what, and I don’t claim to have any magic solutions. But I do wonder what alternatives might be explored that are more in the spirit of empowerment, wholeness, and purpose. Could the CEO invite teams to experiment with self-management, and support their efforts if and when they proceed? Could the CEO begin to practice self-management, at least within her own team of executives? Could the CEO share with the rest of the company his own authentic hopes and fears about a potential transition?

And what is a CEO to do if the company as a whole does not want the freedom, responsibility, uncertainty, and pain that comes with such a transition? Wouldn’t it be against the spirit of a compassionate community to force such a change? And anyway, wouldn’t such force merely arouse suspicion, resentment, and resistance from those who it is forced upon?

In Zappos’ case, anyone who did not want to transition were invited to leave the company with generous severance pay. I like the individual freedom in this, but again I worry about the precedent: not everyone is welcome in this community.

I suspect there is still a lot of opportunity for creativity and experimentation in helping organizations transition to self-management more gradually, organically, and compassionately.

 

“To be alive is by definition messy, always leaning towards disorder and surprise. How we open or close to the reality that we never arrive at safe enduring stasis is the matter, the raw material, of wisdom.”

-Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (p. 67)

John Gruber, on the departure of Sal Soghoian from Apple and the apparent dissolution of the macOS automation team:

Part of my argument for why I feel so much more productive on a Mac than an iPad revolves around the automation technologies that Soghoian’s group developed. […] I find this to be a profoundly worrisome turn of events for the future of the Mac. […] On a personal note, I’ve known Sal for a long time. I first met him at a WWDC in the early years of Daring Fireball.

I too met Sal at WWDC years ago. (I knew one of the engineers on his team from grad school.) Even in 2008 I wondered about the future of the automation team, for the simple reason that the WWDC session on automation technologies was always scheduled in the smallest room, in the last time slot, on the last day (when many attendees had already left town).

I see these automation tools as experiments of sorts, exploring which programming-like tasks users can accomplish without needing to actually learn to program. AppleScript, for example, adopted an experimental English-language like syntax that aimed to be more approachable than other programming languages. Apple’s more recent Automator app used more of a graphical, lego-block approach. Both of these rely on other apps to surface third-party functionality in a way that is accessible to the automation tool. It’s not clear how many people ever really used these tools.

Meanwhile, the Mac moved over to Unix and gained 30 years worth of command-line automation tools. Now it’s often easier to copy and paste a Terminal command from a web search than it is to set up an Automator workflow. And the developer community continued to grow and ship new automation-related apps and scripting languages, for everything from text editing to web design to server maintenance. So the Mac is not losing its ability to be automated — on the contrary, there are more ways to do it than ever before.

Now Apple has thrown its weight behind different, related efforts: it’s not hard to imagine Siri becoming capable of many of the things Automator could do (even Automator’s robot icon foreshadowed this). And perhaps Apple’s Swift Playgrounds app, designed to help anyone learn how to program, can be seen as an assertion that previous automation technologies were too limiting — you may as well dive in and learn to code.

I think it’s a testament to Soghoian’s commitment that the automation tools team lasted as long as it did — and that the Mac has such an abundance of automation tools today. I’m not really sure what the team’s dissolution means for the future, but I think the space is still ripe for exploration. I hope Apple, Soghoian, and the developer community will continue to experiment.

“When I tell people my team only works five hours a day, their response is always, ‘That’s nice, but it won’t work for me.’ The 9-to-5 is so ingrained in their minds that they can’t imagine anything else. But you can reduce your hours by 30% and maintain the same level of productivity.”

-Stephan Aarstol, The Five Hour Workday

The classic Zen koan goes: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Today I ask: “If there exists a fact but no one believes it, is it true?”

Science seeks to uncover objective truths — facts that exist independently of any given person’s beliefs. But scientists are still human, and humans make mistakes (logical and otherwise), so you can never be absolutely certain about any given scientific truth, no matter how many experiments we run. (As a scientist or science-minded person, it’s easy to overlook this depressing fact.)

Meanwhile, if someone believes something, then the fact that they believe it is, in and of itself, true. This is why journalists report on what people believe, even if there may be compelling evidence that the belief is faulty. As Simon Sinek puts it in his classic TED talk: “People will do the things that prove what they believe.” If you believe that global warming is a hoax, or that immigrants are responsible for economic decline, you will vote for a candidate who appears consistent with those beliefs. So in determining the outcome of the election, the belief carries far more weight than what happens to be objectively true (which no one can be absolutely certain about anyway).

A belief is our own subjective experience of what is true. It’s what’s real to us. It’s internally certain. And as such it often carries far more power than what may or may not be externally factual.

In this sense, you could argue that beliefs are more true than facts. Beliefs are the truest thing there is for the person that believes them. Moreover, if you are interested in taking action in the world, and inspiring others to act, then knowing what people believe is usually at least as important as knowing the facts.

So if there exists a fact but no one believes it, is it true?

And if it’s true, does it matter?

 

 

“Often, what we have conjured [in the past] assumes the sheen of inevitability, as if its results were inalienable facts in the world rather than the product of someone’s ideas and actions. In other words, design solidifies, and naturalizes, things that start off as opinions, stories and traditions, supplying form to the fictions by which we live. We rarely stop to consider the faith-based proposition represented by our paper money or the imagined national narratives engendered by borders. Unlike words, the meaning of which can be debated, the objective materiality of designed objects exudes a unique power. Once established, it’s difficult to think outside the systems and structures these objects represent.”

-Michael Rock, “The Accidental Power of Design” (NY Times)

“The vulnerability of not knowing is in fact the only portal through which breakthroughs occur.”

-Amy Whitaker, Art Thinking (2016)