Schrödinger meets von Moltke

Remember him?

Thought so ;-)

I have had an epiphany the other day.

I was talking about project management methodologies with a colleague, and he jokingly referred to quantum theory, saying something to the effect that the amount of effort put to analyse a new project before it is even formally started is by no way an ndicator of its future success. I replied something like "von Moltke uncertainty principle" and we both had a laugh and that was the end of it. 

But still, this conversation was running in crcles in the back of my mind, like a song you hear early in the morning and that you cannot get out of your mind for the rest of the day.

It took some time to percolate.

I plan. I love planning. I build intricate plans, try to take each and every parameters into account, have backup plans, alternate routes, different sets of objectives, redudant reources pre-allocation, min/max cases, critical paths by enveloppe and super critical ones. I take pride and derive a lot of self-esteem from that work. In effect, planning becomes more satisfying than doing. Which would be bad if I wasn't actually accomplishing something factual from time to time, but still feels wrong when I look at the time I have spent planning for things that I haven't done.

So, von Moltke emphasises the fact that even though a plan cannot be perfect, that, at some point, you will have to improvise to some extent. But, ultimately, all of this planning is worthless when it is not being put to use. Your plan is there, but what will it lead you into? You have to actually open the box and take a look at the cat.

And you open the door and you step inside...

Well, all of this I knew already. I hadn't really thought it out fully, but I knew of the implications. What I hadn't realised was that my love for planning had slowly encroached on most aspects of my life. And that because I am feeling the need to have "backup plans", I have developped an unhealthy tendancy to keep my options open. There is nothing inherently wrong with keeping one's options open. However, when you never exercise one of them, it is worrying. I feel like I have spent most of my time identifying doors, looking through their keyholes, but rarely opening them and actualy stepping inside. Paradoxically, even though these options provide me with a wide range of alternatives allowing me to safely choose the course I want, I just felt my world feeling with uncertainties.  

I will have to take action on that. But right now, I do not know where to start or what to do.

How to be a bachelor at 40?

The recipe is quite simple: always put your business first. Let nothing and nobody get between you. Derive you interests from your work. Never stop. Choose a field almost entirely devoid of members of the sex you are interested in. 

Know your priorities, intentions and motivations ; and live according to them.

Easy ;-)  

Christmas...

... the time of the year when you are supposed to feel guilty when you acknowledge that you are living mostly for yourself ;-)
As if you could live for someone else...

To avoid this, you usually bring gifts and presents, as to atone for our greed. Greed is good ;-)
In more than one way actually :-)

Strangelove

The people fighting against abortion once had a stroke of genius: they labelled their action "pro life".
How universal.
How noble
Who could be against life itself?
Abortion rights supporters became the de facto PRO DEATH faction. Bad PR ;-)
Well, they decided to fight back, found something more palatable, and named their faction "pro choice". It put a nice spin to it, and it kind of became my litmus test for imbecility. Life and death are pretty simple, on/off, binary concepts, while choice is a question far greater and more complex.
One is an irresponsible oversimplification designed to polarize public opinion, the other is a hard fundamental question that may lead us to inconvenient imperatives.
Guess which is which ;-)

So, when my friends the econazis came up with nice polished marketing slogans like carbon neutral and pro environment, they kind of reminded me of the disturbed retards brandishing foetuses in jars over their head while howling inane slogans you can see demonstrating in front of clinics, right before they decided to bomb the place and kill the staff, all in the name of life, of course.
Nobody is against the environment. To be honest, I suspect that most people do not care and that there are not that many people who are truly concerned about it. But who can say he is against it? Someone with a little bit of honesty may very well say that humanity has made an habit of modifying its environment, that these very modifications made our world and our lives what they currently are. So we literally built our own world to make it agreeable to us, and this is progress. It gave us sapience, science, culture and all of their side effects, good ans bad. Now the same science that we have cherished for so long is telling us that we may have been over indulgent and overlooked some dire consequences. You can doubt science. Hell, you must. This is what it is for.
Correlation is not causation (a lesson the current economic crisis should have made clear to all), most of the effects of the current global warming have been measured for a very short time, and most people do not understand the science anyway. I mean, the chances are good that you, like most people, do not intimately understand why your feet are on the ground. You can answer "gravity", but you cannot explain it, still another empty word covering a very concrete fact. And we are talking about a theory exposed at least three centuries ago. So better not start talking about how some strange gases are behaving in the upper atmosphere and take a leap of faith: the earth is warming, and humanity is doing it.

Or not.
To be honest, I couldn't care less, because it is utterly irrelevant.
What is relevant is that, for the first time since we have won the Third World War, we have a new enemy. Global warming, true or false, is a waking call for us to rediscover a commonality of purpose, a goal and a drive toward progress. So, even if we do not understand it, even if we do not believe in it, let's at least pretend. Better still, take the worst case scenario for granted: there is nothing we can do, the seas will rise, the raging sun will bath all life in lethal radiations, we will start glowing and soon after we will all die (in atrocious pain, of course). We are utterly doomed.
So what?
We were all doomed before. It is not the first time this is happening to us. We have lived for fifty years under threat of nuclear Armageddon, and we are still here to talk about it, brag about it, even regret the time.
So we do as we already did. We find a way out. A way to reverse thing, or adapt ourselves, or adapt our environment or a combination of all that. And we do it fast.
Our present economy is based upon fossil fuel. There is no quick and easy way out of it. Then we better use our dwindling resources carefully and efficiently. We collaborate, communicate, share; organize ourselves.
Find solutions. Fight the circumstances. Haul our methane farting asses out of the stinking pit.

There is nothing like a common enemy to get things moving in the right direction, so let's all be PRO DOOM and enjoy it while we still can :-)

On a train to nowhere

It is funny how the same subject sometimes comes up again and again in widely different contexts, and how seeing the same thing under different lights gives you insight. These days it seems to be how we compartmentalise our live(s).
I had separate talks about this with a colleague and two friends. One of these friends, Mr G., is a past colleague of mine. We do not work in the same line any more, and while we do have a professional relationship beside our comradeship, we no longer need to compartmentalise our lives. But we still do. Old habits die hard. We talked about it, and our conclusion was that our shared experience most intense moments happened when we were playing the Game. So, for us, it is a bounding behaviour, a deadly serious private joke of a kind.
Looking at it in different contexts made me think, which is always dangerous for me ;-) Compartmentalisation has many flavours: it goes from behaving differently depending on who you are with, a thing we all do, consciously or not, to living different lives. It has many causes too: from it being part of your job, to a comfort option you choose to be polite. Whatever the how and why, doing it is not that hard when you have the right aptitude and, possibly, training. It is in fact surprisingly easy. The trouble comes when you have to merge: filling these blank spots in your live, your CV, telling without compromising. This is what they never tell you: you may go back, but never fully. Up to a point, there will always be a part of your backstory you will have to stick to, however small it is. The trouble is that a backstory is just a mean to an end. And you do not want to be just a mean.
Except if you are a true bastard, of course ;-)

The French Touch IV

"Ici chacun sait ce qu'il veut, ce qu'il fait quand il passe."

Imposter Syndrome

"While you're saving your face, you're losing your ass."

The great modern thinker who said that once described himself as such:

"You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy."

He also said, in no particular order:

• "You aren't learning anything when you're talking."
• "The noblest search is the search for excellence."
• "Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right."
• "Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath."
• "I want to make a policy statement. I am unabashedly in favor of women."
• "I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her own way. And second, let her have it."

As well as

• "There are plenty of recommendations on how to get out of trouble cheaply and fast. Most of them come down to this: Deny your responsibility."
• "We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood."

So, who will you cast your vote to in the upcoming European elections?

Expressing Intent: The French Touch

Sometimes, interacting with native French speakers may become somewhat challenging for the vectorial psychology practitioner. As we already know, vectorial psychology practical foundation lays in well known intents that are efficiently communicated. And as much as we would like to believe that being human transcends cultural boundaries, and as much as we would like vectorial psychology to be equally suited to kick any human ass with gusto, enthusiasm and effectiveness sometimes, just sometimes, we are faced with the fact that some people brain wiring does not really seem to match with what we have always considered to be human. There, being humane and considering these poor souls linguistic plight may be helpful.
You see, when I say that I will act in some manner in the future, what I am saying is that I am both willing and intent on doing that. For us, future tense carries with it intent and disposition. We are using the magic word: will. Simple, efficient and quite logical when you look at it. Well, not so in French. Except by using some periphrase like "J'ai l'intention d'agir", there is no guarantee that the person telling you "J'agirai" is indeed willing to act... Well, it carries a subtler text, where "Avoir l'intention de" means being just possibly willing but not being really intent.
Still, the point here is that the future French is more often than not closer to the English conditional, because while as in English it allows for external circumstances to affect the action outcome, it does not carry with it the speaker's expression of its intent and will.

Perfectionnite

The trouble with being a perfectionist is that you tend to forget about how to make messes. Of course, you may very well create the perfect mess to suit your purposes, but you have forgotten how to make a mess of your life, and how to deal with it. You were so busy plotting, so successful in your schemes, so complacent in your victories that you have forgotten how not to be the prime mover in your life. And now it is payback time: you can no longer deny that you have missed a few steps.
So, what will you be doing about that? Well, do as usual: at first stop being overwhelmed, define the process that is bothering you, then back to your plotting routines, with a shorter cycle, like when you are learning, because this is exactly what is happening. And make messes, even if you are not supposed to, or if it hurts your pride, and learn from them.
You are so used to being right or, more appropriately, not to be wrong, that you have forgotten that yours game is not the only one in town.
Go learn it, play and have fun.

The art of being implicit

It must be a fad, a trend, or more like a plague really.
In the past few weeks, I have met more than a few people who seem to believe that communication is mainly implicit. I won't get into information theory, promised. Let's just take a simple example: if communication was mainly implicit, they would not be able to read this post, as any education process would be doomed to fail. You do not believe me? Be my guest, try your hand at Rongorongo or Linear A.
The trouble with what is implied is that the beholder has to grasp the implication. And, with a poor signal to noise ratio (oooops, sorry for that;-), it may very well be that your beholder has not perceived enough information to find clearly and precisely what is being implied. Furthermore, you, as the message source, should be aware, and most probably are, that your communication mode is ambiguous at best, because, mainly, what you are relying on is interpretation, and not even your own at that... I may have been drilled too well, but, to me, interpretation needs confirmation.
While the lack of a basic understanding of the importance of subjectivity in the communication process is worrying, it still bothers me less than what leaving the heart of a message unsaid implies. This is of course only my interpretation, but I cannot escape the feeling that leaving things unsaid is close to hypocrisy, especially when leaving things unsaid is done to preserve ones own comfort. Not that it is not important, just that you have to keep your priorities straight: when you communicate, you do it to tell something, be it some witticism, what you want or what you will. So, basically, you are communicating because you have to, following your own motivations. And communication is action. And you do not act to loose or against yourself, do you?
Of course, this does not mean that you may not be subtle or manipulative, matters that I intend to tackle in "The art of being a gracious bastard, or how to make little girls cry without clubbing baby seals" ;-)

Credo, or not.

I do not believe, but, up to a point, some basic assumptions are bound to be based on faith, or to be taken at face value, for the lack of a logical explanation that I can find. Which, incidentally, means that I do not believe that everything may be explained by a primordial cause. Some things are intrinsic, some aren't.

I have standards, principles, values. They do not change easily, but they are constantly evolving, in the process of being refined or redefined, however slowly that may be. They make the lens through which I see the world, give it meaning, and, eventually, are the basis upon which I may consider taking action. Whatever they may be, I do not consider them to be of any importance for anyone but myself. Because I do not consider that intents are of any consequence whatsoever. Acts are what really matter, and their consequences what really are. One is appreciated by one's own actions, whatever is backing them.
In this regard, I do not consider that things are intrinsically good or evil. Good and evil are notions that are largely irrelevant and always contingent. So, whatever my standards, principles or values may be, they are not intrinsically good nor evil. Nonetheless, they allow me to give meaning to the world I am living in, and provide me with a an idea of how this world should be. They allow me to elaborate strategies to change my world, to prioritize them, and to select the appropriate means to my ends. Once again, this process is mostly internal, and of no consequence whatsoever to anyone but myself. What is of importance are the actions I am actually taking, or not.
Furthermore, and however tempting solipsism may be, I also believe that I am not alone in my world. It is populated by others that are acting as I am: willingly, and intent on promoting their own visions of the world. With so many different points of view, while implementing one's own vision is a worthwhile objective, what truly becomes primordial is not to allow one's own vision basic tenets to be ignored or, worse, defeated.
So, ultimately, there is no good, there is no evil, there is only the world we are living in and what we will to make of it. Fully realising our will is not as primordial as to allow our core objectives to be reached. Of course, by taking this stance, what becomes important is how we distinguish between what is primordial and what is not, between what we cannot afford to loose and what we can. This difference is essentially a matter of personal standards, principles, values. We may consider that whatever goes against them is evil, and whatever promotes them is good, but we must remember that these qualities are essentially derived from personal values, and, per se relative.
Morality while being relative is not irrelevant. This is the tool we routinely use to simplify how our environment is in comparison to what we will it to be. I am not using the word will indiscriminately: to refine what I said above, while we may desire a different world, at the very least, we only will to change it not to loose the opportunity to see our desires come true. As we effect out will, gradually, we gather the means and provoke the circumstances to make the world as we want it to be according to our desires. This gradation comes from how we prioritize our values. Corollary: the closer we get to our ideal world, the more generally morally intransigent we become.
Other actors have their own morality and with so many perspectives on morality, we have to find some common ground. As we have already established that intents are irrelevant, what we are left with is what we may observe. So, how, instead of why, we are acting is of paramount importance. This is why manners matter so much. This is why know how is nothing once deprived of proper context. A polite society is a morale society.

While intents and motivations are irrelevant on a morale perspective, once expressed, they allow us to find similarly minded people. This expression, provided it is true, allows us to bind and group to aggregate our wills to reach a common goal.
I believe that expressing our intents and motivations is an action, be it in acts or words. So, while my intents and motivations are irrelevant, how I am expressing them is. This is why my word binds me when I am expressing my will in a polite society. In the eye of the beholder, there is nothing to say when I am expressing my will and when I am not. Therefore, in a polite society, my word is my bound. A morale society in an honourable society.

From what has been said earlier, we may deduce that to belong to a morale society, one has to observe manners, act consistently to avoid misinterpretations and take nothing from granted when effecting his own will. Therefore, a morale society is made of actors both both polite and honourable, erecting these values as a way of life.

Trailblazers

I am an elephant.

I go places, shaking my tusks, trunk blaring and ears flaring: this is what mammoths do.
My footprints have graced many virgin slopes. Sometimes, thanks to my elephantine memory, I even knew that what I was doing was new and that I had found some unspoiled playground: this is how mammoths are.
I even bragged about it first, so for others not to infringe on my hot bragging rights: this is why other mammoths are woolly and I not. This why they are extinct, and I not.

Because I have beaten the less travelled path, I am here to bring this testimony: be unafraid of sea monsters. You have already ground your tusks on what you know, so what may scratch your itch is still unknown. The chart is not the territory, so go far, deep, and fast if you can, bring novelty to the world, and shake your tusks, keep your trunk high and your ears flared ;-)

B2R

There is no good, there is no evil.
There are no good guys, there are no bad guys.
There is only the world you want to live in.
The goal shouldn't be to win, but not to loose.
At any cost.

Passive-aggressive

This shit’s making me crazy
The way you nullify what’s in my head
You say one thing do another
And argue that’s not what you did
Your way’s making me mental
How you filter as skewed interpret
I swear you won’t be happy til
I am bound in a straight jacket

Sounds familiar?
Trouble with that?
The good news is that you are not alone: I am here to enlighten you.

The key point here is that dealing with people who "say one thing do another" is too much trouble to be burdened with. Furthermore, this should not be your problem. Except when you have to deal with such a person. Then, to protect your sanity, peace of mind and existential comfort, you may want to take some drastic action to ensure that this situation does not repeat itself. Ever.

Basically, this behaviour provides the perfect case point for vectorial psychology, the universal theory of everyone, because almost everyone exhibits this trait.

What you are dealing with may be labelled as "passive-aggressive behaviour". Essentially, it may be construed as acute moronism, or the willing or unwilling inability to reconcile act and intent. While not clinically nor politically correct and a tad too broad for some, this definition is fundamentally correct as long as symptoms are taken into account.

How do you deal with it? Simple. You go for the root, the afore mentioned inability to reconcile act and intent. One may have numerous reasons not to act as intended, be it excessive politeness, lack of intent, or just plain old stupidity. In the end these are irrelevant, as they all stem from a common cause: the combined lack of understanding of one's own intents, lack of purpose and confused priorities. Addressing all these points may be tiresome, so my preferred way to achieve unification of act and intent is what is known as "The Sarajevo Experience", or "The Pool Plenty Of Piranhas". These methods both include placing the subject, or target, in an hostile, primitive, environment where there is only one option: getting out, preferably alive and intact. Faced with such a primordial choice, namely living or not, the target's priorities are redefined, and the distinction between principal and accessory is achieved, usually by attrition. What must be done becomes exceedingly clear, and priorities even clearer. There is a poetic justice to it too.
At some point, you get an individual who is both well adjusted to his environment, and whose intents are imperative, and even more importantly, who won't bitch about it.
So now that you have your straight arrow, all you have to do is to find something to point it at and let it loose: it won't miss, or die trying.