The 'central problem' I'm trying to solve
How do we best live the Serenity Prayer in a world that we created but did not evolve to live in?
A few years ago, I realized that a lot of my interests and basically all of the questions I was grappling with seemed to circle around a central problem. At the time, I defined it as the problem of “how to understand human nature.” Since that time, I realized that that conceptualization was both too broad in many senses, and too narrow in a few. I've since tried a few other articulations which didn’t quite get at it:
How do we live the Serenity Prayer?
How do we summit “Mount Maslow”? How do we even map it?
How do we create a world—or at least a community—that lets us make the choices we most want to make?
All of these questions are undergirded by the recognition, in fact the assumption, that we as humans live in a world we created but did not evolve to live in. (If you are a creationist, ask yourself whether substituting “were not created for” will make sense in this context—I hope it will.) My previous understanding of my ‘central problem’ was too broad because I'm not simply looking for academic answers: I want to live a live I enjoy living, a life I’m proud to live; I want to work with others who share my vision and build such lives for themselves.
But it was also too narrow, because it focused only on the problem of understanding human nature. Understanding what human nature is—and where its limits lie—is certainly part of the problem. Humans are incredibly cognitively and behaviorally plastic, but nowhere near infinitely so. We keep making the same mistakes over and over—even when we try to account for the mistakes we know we made the last time.
It’s Hoftstadter’s Law1 meets Murphy’s Law. I’m sure I’m not the first person to observe this, but I will immodestly call it Pinette’s Law2—or perhaps even more immodestly: Pinette’s First Law, since I already see an obvious Second Law:
First Law: We, as humans, keep and will keep making the same mistakes over and over—even when we account for the way that we failed to take our previous mistakes into account last time
Second Law: This is particularly true when we are operating as groups, indeed the bigger the group the truer it is.
The thing about all of this, the aspect of “the central problem” that ‘human nature’ alone misses, is that I am looking at the intersection of human nature with emergent order: with complexity beyond human control, often beyond even human understanding.
I am hardly the first person to recognize that these two issues go together. I like to cite James C. Scott, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Arthur Koestler for giving me much of the conceptual framework I use to understand complexity and emergent order, but both are clearly aware that the problem is in how humans try to understand both these things: Scott, Taleb, and Koestler certainly have a working understanding of the laws I named after myself: it was seeing their understandings of these points that led me to investigate and finally name the pattern.
But the ‘central problem’ actually goes back further than that. My working articulation of the ‘central problem’ looks like this:
How do we find ways of living in the world we’ve created that are true to our own values without disregarding the limits of human nature?
That formation is imperfect and incomplete—and I am certain I will revise it again. And yet both what I’m grappling at and its very ineffability seem to be what the Dao De Jing says when it tells us that:3
Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself.
Even the finest name is insufficient to define it.
Without words, the Tao can be experienced,
and without a name, it can be known.
I see a similar pattern in Idries Shah’s accounts of Sufism—as well as the interpretations of Sufi thought by Taleb, by Borges, by Kahlil Gibran, by Paulo Coelho and James P. Carse. Shah and Gibran’s interpretations of Sufi teachings—or Coelho’s ‘personal legend’ and Carse’s ‘infinite game’—are ineffable, but it seems to be grappling this same ‘central problem’ from different angles.
I do not think it's a coincidence that Sufism and Daoism both arose in conditions very similar to today: times when we had built a world beyond our ken or control—yet ‘experts’ still believed they could understand and thereby control it if they simply made enough rules and broke the problem down small enough. Sufism and Daoism, in contrast: both taught that there are some things that you can’t understand, much less control. And both taught that there are limits to human nature that you can’t change—although they share this will all of the world’s great religious traditions.
The ‘rationalist’ philosophies of Warring States-era China and the Medieval Middle East are dead: though some modern thinkers have tried to revive Islamic rationalism, it seems even less successful than the “Neopagan” revival. In sharp contrast: Sufism and Daoism have not just outlived the cultures that spawned them: they have found purchase in the contemporary West even among many of the religiously disinclined. (So, to be fair, have forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.) I would say that their survival and spread of Sufi and Daoist ideas is precisely because they teach us how to live the Serenity Prayer: how to identify accept what you can’t control and focus on what you can.
Of course the world is changing rapidly, the systems we deal with today are often orders of magnitude more complex than they were in the time of Al-Ghazali or Zhuangzi. The Daoist and Sufi texts we have are largely stripped of the cultural context in which they arose. Scott and Koestler and Taleb, and all the many others like them, have only articulated small parts of the ‘central problem.’
It is not my goal to define and explain the entirety of ‘central problem,’ I don’t even think that’s possible. Like the Daoists and Sufis I believe much of it is beyond explaining, beyond even fully understanding. But it is not beyond understanding well enough to account for it, to use our understanding to navigate the way that we handle the emergent realities that the complexity of our modern world creates. I’m not interested in generalities then, I’m interested in practice and proofs of concept that what I understand about the central problem is valuable and I can prove it.
Like the Daoists and Sufis of old—or like Sherlock Holmes and Richard Feynman—I want to both prove I can both ‘work’ miracles and explain how I performed them, for those who are ready to hear the explanation. And this is the unifying theme of what I am pursuing in my self-employment myself: no that I am simply interested in the ‘central problem,’ but that there are areas where the domain knowledge I have—combined with my understanding of the central problem—will allow me to work ‘miracles.’
In both my own projects and what I offer as a consultant, I have therefore chosen only to pursue things where I think I would have an “unfair advantage” even without my understanding of the ‘central problem”—but where I think my understanding of the ‘central problem’ sets me up to truly excel. But I will explain how all these things relate to the central problem—and why I think I have an unfair advantage in them—in future posts.
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
As I lay these points bare, I realized this observation is closely connected the observation I’ve been calling “Magpie’s Razor” almost since I changed my name after my father’s death, but had been saying for about five years before that:
Magpie’s Razor: Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by the groupthink of self-interested individuals.
First corollary to Magpie’s Razor: Before you upgrade a “crank” to a “conspiracy theorist,”
make sure that their argument actually requires a conspiracy.
Second corollary to Magpie’s Razor: Conspiracies require secrecy to function. If a ‘conspiracy’ would work the same way even when the it’s public knowledge—especially if it depends on actions that are already public knowledge—it’s not a conspiracy.