Category: Thinking

Checkov’s gun

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Checkov’s gun is a concept that in any story, there should be no irrelevant elements as they create an expectation that’s never met. Elements, like a gun, with no connection to the story should be edited out. Assuming a blog post is a story, you cut it down until it’s all down to the essence.

I find this theory fascinating and probably right, no matter if I agree with it or not. And while I’m trying to match it when writing, I think I enjoy seeing well-placed exceptions. One of my favorite book quotes is completely disconnected from the storyline, yet it stuck in my brain and made a footprint there.

“Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Why do bad things happen to good people?

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I feel uneasy when something bad happens, particularly to people who deserve the opposite. Traffic accidents, for example, are a constant source of unfairness. They are indiscriminate and unforgiving, particularly to the people with the least guilt – crossing the street or sitting in the backseat. The news outlets make sure that we know about the worst of these accidents, or the second worst on a day off.

For most of my life, I believed that an answer to the question exists. For example, a car accident must be preventable – drive slowly or be careful when crossing. Don’t go out in the car on a snowy day. That person who got sick? They must’ve eaten too much sugar, smoked, or something else. But what about the friends who got hit by a young BMW driver while waiting for a bus? Did they do something terrible and get punished by a cosmic entity?

I’ve found a variety of spiritual explanations for the problem: “There’s a greater plan for everyone, everything bad that happens now is for the good that will happen tomorrow”, “God takes the angels early” and so on. For example, you break a leg but it saves you from being drafted into the military and dying there. Also, a whole range of explanations are based on the concept of karma and punishment. A seemingly random terrible thing can be explained by that person’s previous sins. For ages, I was stuck in this kind of thinking, and probably still am.

Thinking Errors

Thinking errors or Cognitive distortions are beliefs that make a person perceive the world in a wrong way. It took me a while to realize that while the question “Why do bad things happen to good people” is not a thinking error, almost any answer to it is, and it can be one of a number of different ones.

I randomly read about the Fallacy of Fairness one day and had a slowly progressing lightbulb moment.

The Fallacy of Fairness is the belief that things that happen should be fair. You work hard, you need to get a reward. You do a good thing, it gives you a +1 karma. That person is good, they should be rewarded, and they should not be hit by a car. When an event happens, you feel bad because it is not fair. You try to find reasons for the event to make it fit within the realm in which only fair things are allowed to happen. The whole train of thought gives no relief as eventually, you reach the fundamental problem that bad things do happen to good people, and this makes no sense if the world is fair. But the world cannot be unfair.

A Chess Reference

In the game of Chess, players try to checkmate each other by executing multiple-move attacks. Most players will execute these multiple-move attacks no matter what their opponents play. However, not predicting a response would often defeat that attack after the first move, so sticking to the same plan would just lead to a defeat. The position changes after each move and you need to constantly rethink the position and look for new multiple-move combinations.

To translate this example to real life, let’s say a catastrophe happens. The world changes. It’s not fair. It’s easy to:

  • Stick to the past. Say that the change in the world was not fair. We need it to be fair and we refuse to move on. However, in Chess, this leads to losing games – we are moving pieces without reevaluating the position.
  • Explain it, and make it sound fair. The car was stolen because of bad karma. The dinosaurs did horrible things to each other and never traveled to Mars, that’s why they got the asteroid. However, trying to explain an evil with something like bad karma is also defined by Dr. Albert Ellis as Rationalization. It is yet another thinking error.

The correct response, if life was a game of Chess, would be to base your next move on the current position, not on the past position. We can’t control almost all of the bad stuff that happens. It can be random, or it can be for a reason, or it can be for a reason so stupid that we will never go to believe it even after seeing all 10 slides. We can only choose how we respond to the bad event.

My Current Answer

Bad things happen to good people because it is possible. Play an infinite number of chess games, and any possible position will eventually happen. Unlike Chess, life does not offer the relief of treating lost games as mistakes and the knowledge that a mistake is preventable. Life offers the Fallacy of Fairness as a chance to feel extra bad, and the Rationalization as a way out of feeling bad by blaming bad karma or hoping for a future cosmic reward.

We still have the opportunity to be kind to one another and to make sure good things also happen.

Poor Man’s Bitcoin

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

The communism withdrew from Bulgaria in 1989 and when the political police became unemployed, all sort of weird new things popped up to fill the gap. Grocery stores and supermarkets. New TV channels. More than one kind of ice cream. Fortune tellers. Horoscopes. Insurance racket. Chainmail too – you rewrite this letter 5 times and put it in 5 mailboxes and you’ll live a long and happy life. You don’t and you’ll die in pain. Multiple testimonials included.

One kind of chain mail had a price tag and wasn’t supposed to work, but worked for a while. Let’s call it The Poor Man’s Bitcoin. Here is roughly how it worked, excuse my faint memories for any inaccuracies.

There’s a sheet of paper, cut from a notebook, handwritten by a person who we can call “The Seller”. That sheet of paper contains the rules of the chainmail and 6 home addresses or PO boxes. Rules are as follows:

  • You need to send 2 Leva to the last 5 people in the chain, and also 2 Leva to the person who invented it (the number varied)
  • The way you prepare new copies is by rewriting the sheet and filling your name at the bottom of the list of 5 people in the chain, removing the first one
  • It contains terrible curses that will reach you if you violate the rules, sell more or less than 5 sheets of paper, or don’t mail money to the people in the chain
  • In order to get your money back, you need to temporarily become “The Seller”.

If you follow the rules closely, you should quickly get your money back – just find 5 people to buy your sheet of paper and letters with money would start flowing. Does it sound familiar?

  • It inflated algorithmically
  • Its intrinsic value was zero
  • The only things that kept it living for some time were people’s feelings and beliefs, mostly greed and fear of missing out
  • Some people loved it and were willing to fight that they’ll become rich once they get back their thousands of letters
  • It worked because people didn’t really understand how it works and look past the first 5 or 25 people who would give them money
  • Each transaction benefitted the author of the scheme + the regular system that guaranteed money transfer (the post)
  • Everyone could start their own chain letter

Once most of us were exposed to it, the number of letters turned out to be disappointing, and most people realized that these curses that guarantee the distribution don’t work, it vanished to be replaced years later by lottery tickets. Same feelings but no need to be able to write.

I find it amusing that so many people consider Bitcoin a form of investment while it’s pretty much like the chainmail from the 90s. At least this is how I see things. I do not understand how it works.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Active Listening

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

A colleague is talking. Their case is important and the more they say, the more I’m eager to add to their point or present arguments against. At some point, they need to take a breath and I feel like it’s my turn with all these things I wanted to say. I shoot and feel like something is not right.

Listening is Hard

In our culture, the opposite of talking is more like waiting to interrupt.

— Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion

There are many problems with the waiting to interrupt approach, for example:

  • People are not great at expressing themselves and often don’t say what they mean so replying to what they say is pointless because they don’t mean it.
  • Our brain stack is limited, we can barely remember last 2-3 things we wanted to say and if we don’t get the chance, we might feel frustration or other negative emotions. This is especially true if it’s a group discussion and 2-3 people are more vocal than others and better in interrupting.
  • We are biased when interrupting and don’t give equal chance to everyone to speak.

“Recent research has indicated that the average individual listens for only seventeen seconds before interrupting and interjecting his own ideas.”

— Chapman, Gary D. The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts.

We can do better than that.

Verify What We Heard

The main takeaway from Verbal Judo is that we need to listen with the goal to understand the meaning first, not with the goal to say these 3 or 5 things that came to our minds. We need to verify the meaning and an easy way to do that is by paraphrasing and asking for confirmation or clarification. “So you say (paraphrase here)?”. Note that according to other sources, this will not lead to the best outcome if we expect a tip 🙂 In that case paraphrasing should be more like a direct repetition of what we heard.

My ex-boss 8 years ago loved to stop by my desk and start asking for immediate changes to the e-commerce website we were developing. He usually had a point for these changes but it was super critical to understand what result he wanted, not what change he wanted. What he said might be “move this text from here to here”, while what he meant would be “users don’t see this cool new feature, we need a way to promote it”. Knowing the service better I was often able to suggest other approaches to achieve that same result that worked better if I managed to decode the intent of the request.

Hangouts and Meetings

Radical Candor has an entire chapter dedicated to how we can survive hangouts with the best possible outcome, which would be that all ideas are heard, challenged, and discussed, and decisions are made. The main takeaway for me is:

Give the quiet ones a voice.

— Kim Scott, Radical Candor

Without that, we’ll only listen to those 3-4 loudest people over and over, not that they’re not good. But others might be better. I’ve experienced a situation in which the two loudest people reached a quick agreement for a decision for which other people had important information but had not expressed it. Challenging a decision instead of an idea can be taken personally and hard words started flying. That’s a failure in communication that could’ve been avoided early by listening.

If all goes well, we listen, we verify and clarify the meaning of what is said. It’s our turn now to talk.

Our Turn

Chris Voss thinks that we should push for our beliefs and I somewhat agree.

Remember, pushing hard for what you believe is not selfish. It is not bullying. It is not just helping you. Your amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear, will try to convince you to give up, to flee, because the other guy is right, or you’re being cruel.

— Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It.

I’ve seen so many times how a single person with a voice and a good idea can change, well, almost anything.

Earthsea

Some of the best thoughts on listening I’ve read come from Fantasy. The author is Ursula Le Guin and the quotes are said by her characters Ged and Ogion.

For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

To hear, one must be silent.

Thanks for reading!

The Sense of Purpose and Performance

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

Having purpose is the key to survival, according to Victor Frankl. When facing loss, grief, and hardship, it can be the slim difference between staying afloat and sinking to despair. Victor Frankl’s extraordinary work – Man’s Search of Meaning – had a big impact on my understanding of life, although it’s just a piece of a large puzzle (good summary here).

Today, I read there’s a correlation between having purpose and performance reviews, which amazed me. According to “The Power of Moments”, the top 20 percentile of highest performers in any organization are people who are both passionate and have a sense of purpose for what they do. Also, the sense of purpose beats passion to the dust.

What is Purpose

The purpose is the feeling that what we do gives back to the society, that it has meaning beyond being paid or making a profit. The book gives examples of radiologists, lifeguards, and janitors – how a simple motivational effort focused on the impact of their work highly increased their efforts. That’s not hard for lifeguards, they save lives. Radiologists were shown photos of the people whose scans they were reading and that increased their efforts. Chip Heath and Dan Heath managed to find a research on an overperforming hospital janitor who knew that the purpose of his work is to help people recover. He would not only keep the place clean but talk to patients who have no visitors.

What about building entirely for-profit systems like Google Adwords? How would something like that give back to society when it is clearly focused on making shareholders rich and in many ways makes the world a worse place? Or about a project that’s obviously pointless like the infamous “Ship Your Enemies Glitter”?

Cultivating the Sense of Purpose

The Power of Moments suggests that the sense of purpose can be cultivated. This throws the ball for work performance deep into the manager’s field. Books like “Managing Humans” advice to nurture productivity by positive feedback, noticing things, and treating people well. “Radical Candor” is a research in quality of feedback that I found nice. The difference between books like that and the sense of purpose idea is on what’s being communicated and how.

A person knowing the purpose of things can go above and beyond completing a task. A task for a developer is something like “Build a form to collect this and that information”. That developer can end the year thinking of themselves: “I had a good year. I built 23 forms that collect information.” Unfortunately, that point of view is highly unlikely. Building 23 forms is nobody’s dream. To reach a level where any of that makes sense they may need to complete the Five Whys and ask why until purpose is discovered, somewhere far away from the data collection. A software engineer knowing that these 23 forms make education better and help kids have a successful life could suggest a radical 233 forms approach that’s infinitely better 🙂

“The Power of Moments” provides tools in how to share that purpose so that it has an impact on people. For software engineers, it might be as simple as communicating the company’s goals in specially built moments. Think about Elon Musk, a giant hall full of ‘Ship your enemy glitter’ employees, a carefully crafted event for maximum impact on everyone. There’s electricity in the air.

In 2020 we ship glitter to Mars

— Elon Musk

That’s purpose.

Is Purpose Enough

Most certainly, no, neither is passion. The last quotation was not good enough so I found this, to counter everything I wrote above.

By any normal measure, our growth was great, but it quickly became clear it could be a lot better if we operated less like a soccer team of seven-year-olds: all of us chasing the ball, none of us in position.

— Kim Scott. Radical Candor