Monthly Archives: November 2023

All a Twitter

I love what Twitter did to open the digital world for me. I even wrote a small ebook about how to get started on Twitter. But it has been a decade since I really spent time on this app. I used to have both public and private conversations, and I used to engage in Twitter chats, but now I mostly just transmit these daily posts to Twitter, and only engage there if someone replies to one of my posts.

Essentially, Twitter has become a sharing tool and not a social tool. So, when I see Elon Musk hitting the self-destruct button on Twitter/X, I just question whether I’ll leave before or after that happens?

It has been an amazing ride, and I’m thankful to Twitter for all the wonderful connections I’ve made. I have met so many people on Twitter that I consider friends. I have met these friends at conferences and felt like I’ve known them for years, because I had rich conversations with them on Twitter before we met face-to-face. But I don’t remember the last time I had one of those Twitter conversations. I think it has been years since I engaged meaningfully on Twitter with someone, (although this recent post was inspired by a Twitter reply).

I’m not boycotting Twitter. For now I’ll still transmit my blog there. But it hasn’t been what it used to be for me since before Elon took it over. The difference now is that I find it has a bias like the old YouTube algorithm that leads you down negative rabbit holes. It plays up the rage, and doesn’t curate topics I’m interested in. My timeline doesn’t feel like my timeline, it feels like a newscast, and I hate watching news because it focuses on the negative.

So, I’ll use it as a transmission tool for a while longer, but if Elon decides to blow it up, either intentionally or not, I won’t shed a tear. It will be sad, but so is watching its slow demise. Nothing lasts forever, and maybe Twitter needs to die before a new platform can blossom. I think we might find out sooner rather than later.

Fog and moon

A couple days ago some fog rolled in. Coming home from a dinner, my wife and o say a large coyote wandering down our street. Thankfully our daughter has already brought our cat in for the night. As we got out of our car the coyote was strolling past our driveway and I let out a little shout to ‘Keep going’, spurring it into a faster pace as it went by.

Last night I had a hot tub and the fog was still around. It was eerie seeing the bright moon through the misty fog, and it made me think about what life was like living in caves a couple hundred thousand years ago. No doors to keep out the wild animals, and all kinds of superstitions around the weather and the meaning of different events.

Back then, life was short and ailments like a tooth ache that today could be fixed with a root canal could end up being a fatal and unrecoverable infection. A bad winter could mean starvation. A pack of wild animals could wipe out an entire family. The world was a harsher, more dangerous place.

Today we sit in the comfort of our cars, our homes, and even our hot tubs. We are protected from wildlife, weather, and even other people. And when we look out at the moon on a foggy night it’s not nearly the same experience as our great ancestors. No, to us the fog and moon are an enjoyable sight, a moment to contemplate the hardships of a time long gone… from the comfort of modern amenities.

More than subsistence

We need food to survive. We must feed ourselves. But how we do so varies considerably.

Some people eat purely for subsistence. They know they need to eat so they do. It’s a chore. Maybe they don’t care for food, maybe they are on a specific diet for weight loss,,, or weight gain like a bodybuilder, and they eat what they must to stick to their diet or a timeline.

Some people get immense pleasure from eating. Every meal is an opportunity to celebrate the joy and taste of food. Every bite is a dopamine fix, and an opportunity for enjoyment.

Some people eat for comfort. Food is a non-judgmental friend that is always there for them. They don’t just eat food, they have a loving relationship with it. Food is an entity in their lives, not just objects to be put in their mouths.

Some people don’t get enough food. Food to them is a goal, it’s not just a desire, it’s a need. I think this is where humans and animals all start their food relationships. Babies cry when they are hungry. Caveman spent the majority of their lives hunting and foraging and making weapons, all for the purpose of getting that next necessary and life sustaining meal.

Now, for much of the world food is not just about the next opportunity for subsistence, it’s the quest for something enjoyable. It’s not just a human thing, my cat will wait for me to open a can of wet food, while an endless supply of hard food is available to him. It’s not just about getting energy into our bodies, it’s the desire for an enjoyable meal. Food is a journey and not just a destination.

For that reason, I think food addictions are as challenging as any drug addiction can be. Just as food can be a friend, it can be a foe. In fact it is a horrible foe because it masquerades as a dear friend. It feeds you the illusion of comfort while all the while undermining your health and wellbeing.

Sugar can be as addictive as other more illicit white powders. It can change your gut biome, which in turn can influence your thought processes. It triggers your dopamine to spike and brings pleasure. Studies have demonstrated that mice would rather choose a sugary snack than a dose of morphine. We can have food relationships like these mice, seeking out the dopamine hit of food over drugs. Food over everything else.

Our relationship with food has so many influences, from how prone we are to addiction, to the availability of food when we were young, to the balance or imbalance of nutrients versus junk food we consume, to our pleasure we get or don’t get preparing food.

I think when we live in a world of abundant food, where food is much more than just for subsistence, we need to be conscious of our relationship to food. We need to be intentional about what we need to eat, and we need to be disciplined to reduce the foods that do not serve us well. With too much choice comes too many bad choices, and so we must cultivate a healthy diet, and a healthy relationship with food.

The positive thing about this is that we need not sacrifice taste, there are many foods that are both good for us and tasty. What we must sacrifice are choice and time: Limit choices of bad foods at our disposal, and find the time to make healthier meals that are not as convenient as takeout or premade and prepackaged… All the while being tempted and triggered by our desires to eat sweet, fast, and easy to access calories that don’t add any value to our wellbeing.

We can enjoy food that is also good for us, and we can define our relationship to food around healthy options, but it takes effort, will power, and time. Bon appétit.

Ice, fog. and snow

Before moving to Canada, I had no idea what winter was. Sure, I’d seen it on TV, and I was told snow was cold, but I had no concept of what it was really like. The biggest block of ice I’d ever seen was a block you put in your cooler to make your drinks cold.

I still vividly remember the first time I saw fog, I was 9, and had only been in Toronto a couple months. A dense fog rolled in overnight and on my walk to school I couldn’t see more than 15-18 feet in front of me. Everything was draped in a grey-white void that kept me connected only to the grass field underneath my feet. It was eerie, almost frightening. I couldn’t understand how clouds could take over the world.

Shortly after that I saw my first real snowfall. It was a mind blowing experience to see white puffy snowflakes for the first time.That snowfall was the start of a close friendship with a kid who I threw snow at in the snowball area of our school. It’s funny how some friendships can begin.

Shortly after that, an outdoor hockey rink was put up on the school field less than 1/2 a block from my front door. I went from only ever seeing ice that made drinks cold to borrowing friends skates and having a hockey stick put in my hand. I went home that night with a bruise from my knee to hip… every time I took a shot, I’d topple over and whack my right leg on the ice, with no protection since my arms were fully committed to holding the hockey stick and swinging it.

It’s amazing that I remember this all from 47 years ago. But that’s the way memories work. These were novel first experiences that were at the edge of what I found comprehensible. Whether I was standing in the field of fog, or surrounded by slow-moving snowflakes falling from the sky, or wearing metal blades on my feet to travel across ice, I was in awe of the experience I was having. How did this little kid from a tropical island end up experiencing these things?

Small moments that left a lifetime of memories.

Going Meta

If I was going to give this post a subtitle it would be, ‘How do you know that you’re smart enough to know the difference?’

Just to be clear, I’m delusional. But guess what… so are you. The world we live in and the world we think we live in are two different things. We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as our senses are capable of seeing it. Then we go further and apply our individual perspective to add meaning to what we observe.

I say think of a dog, and I guarantee you that you aren’t thinking of the same dog I am. Not the same kind, not the same size, probably not the same disposition… which might be different in our perception even if we were thinking of the same dog.

So we live lives of illusion and delusion, except most of our delusions are close enough to each other’s that we don’t think of each other as crazy… Most delusions. Although, maybe less of them than at any time in recent history. Because now more than ever people seem to be seeing the world in vastly different ways.

So what can we personally do? We need to get meta. We need to think about our thinking. We have to start from honest awareness and seek to debunk ourselves, to figure out how we are deceiving ourselves. We have to see the frame we put around things. Observe ourselves, (the observer).

This meta self reflection is most important when we talk to someone with a different perspective or world view. It’s so easy to see the bias of others, and much harder to see our own. Yet this self reflection is essential.

A wonderful example of this is looking at the growth in numbers of people who think the world is flat. It flabbergasts me to think that this number is actually getting larger. How is that possible? Flat world views. That is to say, people are asking one question, looking from one central position: ‘Show me the curve… I’m on earth and I can’t see it. You must be delusional and gullible to believe it’s round, when you can’t see it.’

Only then, and from that biased position, can someone make jumps to conclusions like NASA is trying to fool us, and the conspiracy to fool us is suddenly everywhere. Then evidence that fits this world view suddenly starts to appear. Except it doesn’t.

No, what actually happens is that these flat mindsets start to create excuses for everything that doesn’t fit this world view. Never mind that civilizations like the Mayans, 4,000 years ago, understood the movement of the stars and probably already knew the earth was round. Never mind the view of earth from the Apollo moon missions. Never mind simple science experiments that have been around for hundreds of years proving the earth is round.

All that said, the flat earthers start with an observation, or lack of observation of a curve. They are using their senses, that are basing the criteria on their view of the world… their delusion.

That’s an easy example, because there is a lot of evidence debunking a flat earth. But there are a lot of topics where one perspective isn’t so clearly wrong. There are arguments on different sides of the political spectrum, different sides of a global conflict, and different sides of hot topics where the perspective someone, the perspective you, take is not necessarily the clearest. Suddenly our delusion is potentially working against us.

If we aren’t willing to go meta and really look at where our view is coming from, we are susceptible to flat world views. We can get stuck in a single delusional frame of mind where we don’t see what’s really happening, what a better perspective might be. And so just like the flat earther, we only see the issue from a perspective that we can observe, but isn’t correct.

The irony is that the more humble you are, the more likely you are to be able to go meta and see other possible perspectives. It seems that being humble is a key ingredient, because a lot of smart people struggle with this. Religion, politics, and culture all seem to undermine intelligence, and smart people get lost in dogma. Even scientists can do this. It’s not about how smart you are, it’s about how humble you are.

Are you willing to recognize other views? Are you able to let go your ego and really observe an issue from a different perspective? Are you willing to change your mind? Ironically if the answer is yes, you probably don’t need to get meta as often as others. It’s still useful to do though, both to solidify your own view, and to change your mind.

‘Tis the season

Today I put our Christmas lights up outside. We used to have all white lights but they are about a dozen years old and I decided to replace them, and got a couple multi-coloured strands. It’s amazing how much better LED lights have become. It used to be that running outdoor lights actually added to your electric bill, but now two entire strands of 100 lights are less than a single 60 watt bulb from 25 years ago.

I like the tradition of putting lights up, and I enjoy seeing neighbourhoods lit up for the season. When it gets dark before 5pm, it’s nice to have the darkness filled with little sparkling lights. That said, our house is pretty basic compared to some houses.

Tomorrow we put up our tree. That’s new too, replacing a tree we bought in 1999. This one comes with built-in lights. We have decorations that we buy for each family member every year, and they are the main decorations for the tree with only a few regular globes added. My wife and I first bought ornaments of a skiing couple when we were dating, then bought ourselves and our first daughter each an ornament the following year, and we’ve now done so for all 4 of us ever since.

It’s that time, of lights and decorations, and brightening up the gloominess of winter.

AI and humans together

On Threads, Hank Green said, “AI isn’t scary because of what it’s going to do to humans, it’s scary because of what it’s going to allow humans to do to humans.”

I recently shared in, High versus low trust societies, examples of this with: more sophisticated scams; sensationalized click bait news titles and articles; and clever sales pitches, all ‘enhanced’ and improved by Artificial Intelligence. None of these are things AI is doing to us. All of them are ways AI can be used by people to take advantage of other people.

I quoted Hank’s Thread and said, “It’s just a tool, but so are guns, and look at how well we (miss)manage those!”

Overall I’m excited about how we will use AI to improve what we can do. There are already fields of medicine where AI can do thousands of hours of work in just a few hours. For example, drug discovery, “A multi-institutional team led by Harvard Medical School researchers has launched a platform that aims to optimize AI-driven drug discovery by developing more realistic data sets and higher-fidelity algorithms.”

The true power and potential of AI isn’t what AI can do on its own, it’s what humans and AI can do together.

But I also worry about people using amazing AI tools as weapons. For example, creating viruses or even dirty bombs. These are things that are out of reach for most people now, but AI might make such weapons both more affordable and more available… to anyone and everyone.

All this to say that Hank Green is right. “AI isn’t scary because of what it’s going to do to humans, it’s scary because of what it’s going to allow humans to do to humans.”

We are our own worst enemy.

The true danger and threat of AI isn’t what AI can do on its own, it’s what humans and AI can do together.

Broken models

Here are two things that are broken and need fixing. Neither of them have an easy fix. Neither of them will be fixed any time soon. I don’t pretend to have answers. I don’t know who has answers or if they can be solved in my lifetime?

1. The shareholder model of ownership. When companies act on behalf of shareholders they do not act on behalf of customers or employees. The shareholder only cares about profit and gains, and those come at the expense of workers and end-users.

2. Religious zealots. Every religion has good people of faith who live good lives and are sincerely wonderful people. But that doesn’t make all religions equal. Some religions allow for the truly faithful, those following the faith devoutly, to do bad things in the name of God. That’s a broken system. It has removed the purpose of the faith away from the benefit of humanity.

Both systems are entrenched in tradition. Both models create bad incentives that do not serve the public good. Both of these will outlive me. Again, I don’t have answers. I just know that the models are broken.

We aren’t getting rid of shareholders, we aren’t getting rid of religion. How do we reduce the bad incentives? How do you tell a shareholder that their returns should be lower so that employees are better paid, or consumers should get a more affordable price at their expense? How do you tell a person willing to martyr themselves for the glory of God, and their righteous place in heaven, that they should be kind to everyone regardless of faith while they are here on earth?

Again, I don’t know? What I do know is that greed and blind faith are evil, broken parts of systems that need to change. Because everyone suffers in a world where these broken models continue.

It became a tradition

When my wife and I got married, one thing that became clear is that I’m the gift wrapper out of the two of us. It’s not that my wife can’t do it, she just has little patience for it, and I’m somewhat OCD about tight corners and even folds.

A little over 20 years ago, I was wrapping stocking stuffers for my two small daughters and I was using this cheap roll of tape that we had. It was awful, I would have been better off using Post-its than this useless roll of tape that wouldn’t tear on the perforated edge, and wouldn’t stick to anything but itself.

I complained incessantly to my wife about this crappy tape as I wrapped gifts. “If this is going to be my job, we need to have good tape, either we have Scotch Tape or I’m not doing this job!” Yes it was hyperbole, but this tape we had was driving me nuts and it made a fun job into a chore.

Well, my birthday is just over a month before Christmas and the next year when I opened my presents, there was a 3-pack of Scotch Tape poorly wrapped in wrapping paper. “Thank you,'” was my genuinely happy response. It was such a thoughtful gift, I loved it. And there were no complaints come time to do the Christmas wrapping.

20 years later I still get Scotch Tape as one of my Birthday gifts. This year I got a six-pack, my guess is that it was on sale. We won’t go through 6 rolls in one year, but it’s tradition now, and even if we have some left in the house, there are two things I can be certain about… when I open my birthday presents next year one of them is going to be at least one roll of Scotch Tape, and I will be sincerely appreciative of my gift.

Simple little things

A happy thought,
A quiet walk,
A restful pause,
A candid talk.

A social night,
A laugh out loud,
A mutual friend,
A gap in the crowd.

A good book,
A favourite meal,
A restful nap,
A bargain deal.

Simple little things
that come our way.
Simple little things
that make our day.

We can appreciate
what we’ve got.
We can be happy
with our lot.

As long as we
are aware,
that we really
needn’t care…

About things we lack,
and things we dread.
And avoid negative thoughts
in our heads.

As long as we
are aware,
that we really
should care…

About the people we love,
and people in need.
About doing what’s right,
and doing good deeds.

Simple little things
that help us cope.
Simple little things
that bring us hope.

Appreciate the little things
that come our way.
And remember to cherish
each and every day.

The best gifts we have
are love and time.
A life well lived
is truly sublime.

Life need not be filled
with accolades and aclaim,
It need not be a life of
excessive wealth and fame.

What makes us rich are
the simple little things,
that bring us joy
and make our hearts sing.

Simple little things.