Misery, pain, happiness, and brains - Thoughts on Hacker News comments about TTL

The Hacker News discussion about Think, Try, Learn brought up some good points about happiness, whether it's possible, the value of journaling, and personal growth. Following are a few of my thoughts in response.

@todayiamme (a fine and apropos, name :-) Thanks for the points. This is a Buddhist approach, right? The idea that attachment leads to suffering is one that's been with me for years; very influential. From the Think, Try, Learn perspective, I talk about attachment to experimental outcomes. If we desire and expect a particular result, we have a binary success metric, which makes the process an unhappy one. If things are going our way, we are unhappy because we are afraid it will change. Likewise, if things are not going like we want, we are sad too. Much better is to participate in unfolding events as a scientist would - by observing fully, which brings you into the moment. And mindfulness is a way to be happy (another time-tested idea).

So in fact I'm trying to create a philosophy that resonates with the rational mind, but ties in classic ideas for how to be fulfilled. This is opposite to the idea that eternal bliss is possible. (In fact I'm an atheist, and religion doesn't make sense to me. Jack describes this well. That's why TTL is atheist compatible)

Your experience of keeping a detailed diary is interesting to me. It seems to me that keeping a general record is periodically valuable, but in my work the recording is specific to experiments. The thought that I mention in my recent slidecast (The Experiment-Driven Life) is that observation -> awareness -> change. The self-blame sucks, of course, but ironically, in TTL I argue that you get a "health sense of detachment" by looking at events as information/data, which might help with the negative feelings.

Also, I like your clarification to @DeusExMachina. Well put.

@DeusExMachina: I love your quote:

But if you spend enough time growing, looking inside yourself to what is really important to you and learn to enjoy the journey too, you can be happy.

In TTL, the ultimate guarantee of success is that you'll learn something about yourself and grow your character. The process of experimentation will take you in a personal direction you like. Put another way, the focus is on being excellent at discovery, which we all have control over.

Dealing with pain and problems: As you say, they are inevitable, and it's how we cope (with grace, ideally) that defines us. With TTL, my perspective is that those situations are externally-imposed experiments, ones that provide data like such as feelings and pain. Still working this out...

@Jach: Re: brains being a function of ancestral environments - absolutely! I love this quote by Nancy Kress: "A belief in the afterlife [is] probably the single largest aberration of the human mind." (From "Steal across the sky.") In TTL my idea is to manage irrational thinking by modeling it, testing it, and working to make them consistent (AKA "cognitive dissonance," as orangecat points out). In science, throwing out pet theories in is hard, but the truth is ultimately more useful to discoveries. Doesn't work for everyone, though, and may not be as comfortable as other (unprovable) theories.

@todayiamme: re: radical life extension, I'm ready for it now (I'm soon to be 48 YO) but I'm certain it won't be in time. I don't fear death, but I very strongly don't want it. From a time management perspective (my other hat) it can be a real incentive. Just as you point out with the TV watching. (BTW, a "micro" experiment is to go without TV for a week. I guarantee they will have new experiences, even things like being bored, talking more, etc. This is an appropriate setting to have a diary.)

Your quote is poetic, and expresses how I feel too. Thank you for it:

I have decided to spend every moment I have loving other people, and making their lives richer. I've decided to make others smile and create beautiful things. I've decided to learn as much as I can about this amazingly beautiful world before I die. I've learnt that happiness is only real when shared. I can do this only if I am at peace and I accept that problems will always exist around me. Fretting about them doesn't solve much, does it?

The way this fits into TTL is via collaboration with others, from which the best science comes. The idea is to love and help each other with our experiments, and to tune in (i.e., observe) to the great stuff we have going on in our lives right now. After adopting these ideas, I literally see the world differently. I spent 45 minutes one day last winter marveling at sunlight reflecting off snow crystals. I found that as I focused I could see individual prismatic effects that varied greatly as I moved my head slightly. It occurred to me that this might have been the inspiration for Christmas tree lights. Just a thought.

@dan00: Re: happiness being a by-product - absolutely! I think of love that way too. Like happiness and humor, you can't force it, you can only make space and invite it in. [insert garden/seed metaphor, etc.] (Actually, forcing humor via "laughter clubs" is a cool idea - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_Yoga)

@funthree: "Think, then try, then learn, then think. Okay. I needed that." I understand that the title seems obvious. Then again, it's a short name that is supposed to capture the spirit of the scientific method - treating everything in life as an experiment. (P.S. It's funny that you mention Captain Obvious. Check out The Personal Productivity Encyclopedia Of Superhero Powers)

Check Out My 12 Minute Slidecast, The Experiment-Driven Life

The Experiment-Driven Life

View more webinars from matthewcornell.

I've uploaded the 12 minute presentation I gave last week at The Boston Quantified Self Meetup Group #3 in Cambridge, MA. Find it on SlideShare at The Experiment-Driven Life. It's loosely based on my essay on the field of self-tracking and what's missing: The Experiment-Driven Life. (You might also like my earlier post Attention Data Hounds: What Personal Data Are You Tracking?, which includes An Incomplete Summary of Personal Informatics.)

In it I explain what I think is missing from the self-tracking data movement, why it needs to be part of a personal scientific method, how it makes you happier, and a little about our edison (tm) Experimenter's journal tool to help live everything in life as an experiment.

Give it a look and let me know what you think! It's my first take, and I'm developing the ideas as I write my book, "Think, Try, Learn: A scientific method for discovering happiness." Care to join in?

Resources

• The Quantified Self blog
  
• Quantified Self Meetup Groups
  
• The two fun Edison experiments I mentioned are Have magnet implanted in finger and Street Karaoke.
  

Some thoughts on Peter Bregman's HBR post "Live Life as an Experiment"

In his HBR post Live Life as an Experiment, Peter Bregman describes a fascinating mini-experiment where he tries to get out of paying a 20% restocking fee simply by asking. He doesn't push (well, other than to keep asking :-) and he treats the store's employees with respect. It's a fun read, it brings up excellent points about life-as-experiment - 100% Think, Try, Learn. You'll find the comments stimulating as well. Following are my two replies.

I'm curious: Have you tried anything like this yourself? How did it go? How did they react? Did you get the discount? Did you learn something?

(P.S. If you'd like to try it out yourself (or maybe something related like bartering on a price), head over to Edison.)

On the benefits of experimenting in life

Peter, I love your attitude about experimentation, and I think we can all benefit from adding more of it to our lives. You capture the spirit beautifully in your passage about how framing life this way has big benefits. I'm writing a book on this very topic, and I'd like to share a few additional benefits I've thought of:

• Experimenting is fun because trying something new is exhilarating, and discovery feels good.
• Acknowledging you're new and don't know what you're doing is a relief!
• You are guaranteed to succeed because you *will* come out knowing more than you went in.
• You become more playful because your observation skills tune you into the amusing possibilities of life, and open you to delightful surprises.
• You feel more creative because you see things differently and more objectively, which pulls you outside of your normal models, biases, and patterns.
• You deepen self-understanding because you study yourself in action and learn what makes you tick. This leads to working in harmony with yourself.
• You become more courageous, because thinking of something scary as an experiment feels lighter than "all or nothing" models.
• And finally, and maybe most importantly, you are more mindful because observation puts you into the joy of the moment, rather than worrying about the past or future.

On ethics, business, and black boxes

@Mark, et al: re: ethics: Experimentation almost always involves (that's one of the indicators that you're doing one), but in this case the risk was simply discomfort. Peter wasn't responsible for how the employees reacted, and it sounds like he behaved very respectfully. He was simply asking for something, then asking again. I did something similar when Comcast upped our internet rate. I wanted to know whether I would get a discount if I kept asking. It worked! I have a saying, "You never know until you try," (shortened to YNK) or the variation, "If you don't ask, the answer's no."

What Peter did was play with the system. I think of the world (in this case, the store and its employees) it as a kind of black box. Ultimately any complex system is opaque, which means all you can do is observe inputs and outputs. In this case, he poked the box, got responses, and repeated. Crucially, he got data he (and we!) can use in the future. Calling it manipulative in this sense is accurate. What if you called it "play?" Importantly, I hope he had fun with it. Learning to enjoy the process of experimentation (rather than focusing solely on the outcome) is a key to living happily, I'm finding.

@Hiral: The worker was following the script, which is fine. His choice. You could also ask him if you could use the bathroom. He could decline and say it's against store policy, but how would that look from a service perspective. Regarding running a business, getting people who try this experiment is itself data - the best way to look at a business is as *itself* an experiment, especially in these hard economic times. Paying attention to the data, learning from it, and changing is the essence of evolution. It's smart!

@Geri: "Few of us get things right the first time" - exactly. In fact, feeling like you have to get it right ("one chance thinking" I call it) is a major barrier to experimentation. It should also be a warning flag. Well put. Experimentation's redefinition of failure and mistakes is an extremely important shift in thinking. For failure, we should always ask by what metric are you judging it? Often we have a binary, e.g., "Made $1M or didn't." But we can always look at it differently. The ultimate measure guarantees success: "What did you learn?"

@Eric: Your insight about learning by watching others' experiments is spot-on. It's not only a way to get wise safely, but it's also inspiring. Also, it's a way for us to help others by sharing our wisdom and helping them when *they're* experimenting. These are exactly the ideas behind our Edison tool that I mentioned above (http://edison.thinktrylearn.com/). I invite you to check out the experiments we're doing there, such as the person who's implanting a magnet in his finger (http://edison.thinktrylearn.com/experiments/show/147).

Variables

Recently I've been having trouble falling asleep, and it's making me tired during the day. I'm trying some experiments in Edison to figure out what the causes might be (improve sleep hygiene and try melatonin), but it's difficult pinning it down. Why is that? Here are some thoughts. Please tell me what you think!

The human body is a complex system, and complex systems have many variables. Our goal is to understand the system by teasing out the variables that matter and then identifying patterns. Following are some possibilities for sleep in particular. (Note that the default hypothesis when starting it is to ask for each variable, "Is there a significant relationship between this and the problem?"

• Taking naps
• Exercising right before bedtime
• Eating right before bedtime
• A disorder like Bipolar (I have type II)
• Doing a stimulating activity before bedtime (e.g., working, watching a thriller, or spending time on the computer)
• Taking a substance with insomniatic side-effects (including alcohol and caffeine)
• Stress from worrisome problems or situations

There are a couple of problems at work here. First is knowing where to start. In some ways this is straightforward to remedy; simply tap into the existing body of knowledge by doing research. However, since each of us is unique, it's not clear how to narrow the variable search space. Also, much possibly useful anecdotal knowledge is not captured, and resides unstructured in discussion groups, individual blogs, etc. I think providing this expertise is the ideal role of an authority like a medical doctor. But of course that has its limitations, e.g., your physician might not be an expert, he might not know relevant details about you, or your problem might lie outside accepted medical state of the art. (My Think, Try, Learn colleague Liza is a poster child - literally - for stepping out and finding solutions.)

Second, it is hard to have the discipline to do good science, such as controlling for one variable at a time or being adequately patient to let enough data come before forming a conclusion and moving on.

Finally, as a practical matter I think existing capture tools aren't up to the challenge of capturing just the right information in a quick manner. Entering data must be extremely fast, or compliance drops way off. (I looked at a bunch of iPhone apps before deciding this is true. We'll be addressing this with the Edison data layer and tools.)

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I'll leave with some relevant passages I found in my knowledge repository, i.e, my Big-Arse Text File.

Related resources

Benchmarks Online ~ Project 2061 ~ AAAS: Collaboration among investigators can often lead to research designs that are able to deal with situations where it is not possible to control all of the variables. (This is our goal with the second TTL module that will capture and generalized results - code name DaVinci.)

The election isn't just a referendum on ideology: ...when people are given choices with many variables ... they tend to make the best decision when relying on their unconscious. In contrast, people who consciously deliberate ... tend to fixate on extraneous facts, leading them to bad choices. (More in Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, which I confess I haven't rea yet.)

[continues] ... the kind of situations that are best suited for each mode of decision-making ... simple problems - those involving a limited number of variables - are best suited for deliberate thought, so that people don't make any obvious mistakes ... complex problems seem to benefit from the processing powers of the unconscious, as long as people first take the time to carefully, deliberately assimilate all the relevant facts.

Info-Clutter: ...a study out of Australia indicates that the human mind can only process four variables at a time.

Understanding Complexity; Thought and Behavior: Thought Leader George Miller's experiments indicate that individuals cannot rely only on mental activity to inquire into relationships among large sets of variables. If learning about complexity is a goal, external adjuncts to learning are necessary to supplement mental activity.

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