I, too, vaguely glimpse this dichotomy every day! But here's the central problem: if I look back at all the things I've done in my life that are most "A Thing" -- theorems about quantum computing, my book, the Complexity Zoo -- not one of them was A Thing when it started. They were just me messing around, amusing myself or trying to get unconfused. Indeed, if they *had* been A Thing from the start, I would've been much too scared to work on them. So then, at what point in the creation of A Thing does it *become* A Thing? Do we need some criterion analogous to viability outside the womb? :-)
I am constantly wondering if what I'm doing has "thingness", and appreciate you groping at what it is.
One thing that didn't feel quite right to me was the discussion about the bowl and adversarial intent.
I think the biggest effect of the bowl is that the mind that makes the bowl will have a huge effect on the bowls aesthetics, form, and even function. When I use the bowl created by that mind day after day, some of that mind will rub off on my mind, bringing me closer to it.
For instance, if most of my objects are created with a more eastern view of mastery, in which what makes an object masterful is that you can't tell who the creator was (because they subsume themselves completely to function), a bit of that collectivist mind will rub off on me. Similarly with many objects with a more individualistic western definition of mastery in which my uniqueness and style is in each piece, and you can see me in it.
And so the worry about scientism -are the people who wrote the hundreds of scientific papers I read connected deeply to wisdom and love? What mind am I taking on as I read those papers?
I'm constantly worried about the impact of my mind when I'm creating Things. Certainly, I've spent hundreds of hours perfecting my coaching craft, learning words, techniques, theories. but the main question I'm asking myseld every session is an I coming from a mind of wisdom and love as I coach. If the answer is no, I often end the session because I know the impact my mind will have on the transformation that takes place
Similarly as I wriye my book, I've been doing lots of reading on the craft of writing, how to put it together, making sure the framework makes sense, the anecdotes are in the right place, I use active voice, etc. but on top of all those, I'm making sure that the mind that writes the book is one that I'd be proud to have propagate to those that read it.
At the point in this essay where you said you don’t think this essay was Definitely a Thing, I was surprised and ready to disagree. But paradoxically, by the end I was confused enough about what you were trying to impart to be pushed in the direction of tepid agreement.
The message I received was: if you want to have an impact, put more effort toward what is Definitely a Thing and less toward diffuse intangibles. This is why you defend scientism, right? Bringing the rudiments of hypothesis-based analysis to a conversation automatically makes the conversation more likely to produce moments of “thinging” (/semiosis/salience events). It prepares us to recognize repeatable patterns, which opens the way toward leveraging those patterns to create something new.
The problem i have with that (and i do have a problem with it) is that, the more one puts effort only into what is Definitely a Thing, the more one’s output profile starts to match that of a middle manager. Working on something salient promotes coordination and communication, as well as (with some caveats) minimizing risk. But it also, when taken to the extreme, limits one’s ability to discover entirely new things by narrowing one’s attention away from intangibles where the (as you coined in a reply) nascent thing-ness is to be found.
There’s another, related problem. The Goodhart problem. If “things that have thingness” is a target, the thingness of a thing ceases to be a good metric. Every billion-dollar boondoggle was Definitely a Thing. It had to be Definitely a Thing, or it wouldn’t have been able to gain access to all the money it would burn. In the world of grant funding and investment there is an incentive to declare thing-ness prematurely, which leads to misbegotten projects that, in the loss of financial backing which all along was their true life-blood, crack open like an empty egg. Yet if I commit to the view “put more effort into what is Definitely a Thing and less into diffuse intangibles”, I create the same perverse incentive internally. (“I wasn’t procrastinating! I was restructuring my knowledge system.”)
Maybe what I would propose, over “Primarily invest effort into what is Definitely a Thing” (a sentiment you may or not actually support) is this: the value of investing effort into diffuse intangibles is to discover salient things that are worth working on. So even when one’s effort is not directed toward any specific thing, it is still better to bring questions like: “Is this A Thing? How could it become A Thing?” because those questions prime one to notice salience.
Interesting musing. Why though do you focus on the positive and how to define positive? I think that what Szilard put together in an attic type room at Columbia, that turned eventually into the atom bomb, was very much a thing. You could even argue that there was a good side to it in preventing war.
I, too, vaguely glimpse this dichotomy every day! But here's the central problem: if I look back at all the things I've done in my life that are most "A Thing" -- theorems about quantum computing, my book, the Complexity Zoo -- not one of them was A Thing when it started. They were just me messing around, amusing myself or trying to get unconfused. Indeed, if they *had* been A Thing from the start, I would've been much too scared to work on them. So then, at what point in the creation of A Thing does it *become* A Thing? Do we need some criterion analogous to viability outside the womb? :-)
I am constantly wondering if what I'm doing has "thingness", and appreciate you groping at what it is.
One thing that didn't feel quite right to me was the discussion about the bowl and adversarial intent.
I think the biggest effect of the bowl is that the mind that makes the bowl will have a huge effect on the bowls aesthetics, form, and even function. When I use the bowl created by that mind day after day, some of that mind will rub off on my mind, bringing me closer to it.
For instance, if most of my objects are created with a more eastern view of mastery, in which what makes an object masterful is that you can't tell who the creator was (because they subsume themselves completely to function), a bit of that collectivist mind will rub off on me. Similarly with many objects with a more individualistic western definition of mastery in which my uniqueness and style is in each piece, and you can see me in it.
And so the worry about scientism -are the people who wrote the hundreds of scientific papers I read connected deeply to wisdom and love? What mind am I taking on as I read those papers?
I'm constantly worried about the impact of my mind when I'm creating Things. Certainly, I've spent hundreds of hours perfecting my coaching craft, learning words, techniques, theories. but the main question I'm asking myseld every session is an I coming from a mind of wisdom and love as I coach. If the answer is no, I often end the session because I know the impact my mind will have on the transformation that takes place
Similarly as I wriye my book, I've been doing lots of reading on the craft of writing, how to put it together, making sure the framework makes sense, the anecdotes are in the right place, I use active voice, etc. but on top of all those, I'm making sure that the mind that writes the book is one that I'd be proud to have propagate to those that read it.
At the point in this essay where you said you don’t think this essay was Definitely a Thing, I was surprised and ready to disagree. But paradoxically, by the end I was confused enough about what you were trying to impart to be pushed in the direction of tepid agreement.
The message I received was: if you want to have an impact, put more effort toward what is Definitely a Thing and less toward diffuse intangibles. This is why you defend scientism, right? Bringing the rudiments of hypothesis-based analysis to a conversation automatically makes the conversation more likely to produce moments of “thinging” (/semiosis/salience events). It prepares us to recognize repeatable patterns, which opens the way toward leveraging those patterns to create something new.
The problem i have with that (and i do have a problem with it) is that, the more one puts effort only into what is Definitely a Thing, the more one’s output profile starts to match that of a middle manager. Working on something salient promotes coordination and communication, as well as (with some caveats) minimizing risk. But it also, when taken to the extreme, limits one’s ability to discover entirely new things by narrowing one’s attention away from intangibles where the (as you coined in a reply) nascent thing-ness is to be found.
There’s another, related problem. The Goodhart problem. If “things that have thingness” is a target, the thingness of a thing ceases to be a good metric. Every billion-dollar boondoggle was Definitely a Thing. It had to be Definitely a Thing, or it wouldn’t have been able to gain access to all the money it would burn. In the world of grant funding and investment there is an incentive to declare thing-ness prematurely, which leads to misbegotten projects that, in the loss of financial backing which all along was their true life-blood, crack open like an empty egg. Yet if I commit to the view “put more effort into what is Definitely a Thing and less into diffuse intangibles”, I create the same perverse incentive internally. (“I wasn’t procrastinating! I was restructuring my knowledge system.”)
Maybe what I would propose, over “Primarily invest effort into what is Definitely a Thing” (a sentiment you may or not actually support) is this: the value of investing effort into diffuse intangibles is to discover salient things that are worth working on. So even when one’s effort is not directed toward any specific thing, it is still better to bring questions like: “Is this A Thing? How could it become A Thing?” because those questions prime one to notice salience.
Interesting musing. Why though do you focus on the positive and how to define positive? I think that what Szilard put together in an attic type room at Columbia, that turned eventually into the atom bomb, was very much a thing. You could even argue that there was a good side to it in preventing war.