Author: Aceso Under Glass

Thoughts on So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Cal Newport)

Recently I read So Good They Can’t Ignore You.  I have well known trouble distinguishing “things the book said” from “thoughts I had while reading it”, so I’m just going to tell you what I thought and if you’re interested you can track down the book and see how original this was.

The book’s official tagline is “Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work” and it frames itself as anti-passion, but Newport eventually admits that’s a marketing hook.  Mostly his thesis is that passion alone will not make you happy, and skill can be used to extract concessions from your employer that make life more pleasant, so you should focus on skill.  Passion is a great driver for developing skills so that seems like a weak criticism of passion (he puts all the positive aspects of passion under “mission”), but he also suggests that it’s impossible to find something you’re really passionate about until you have a certain amount of skill, so still focus on that.  Given the essentially infinite number of skills available it seems like there’s room for your interests to have input earlier in the process.  I think what he’s really attacking is the idea that your job should be a source of entertainment.  That has given me severe clarity in what I’m looking for job-wise.

The epitome of the jobs-as-entertainment model is “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”.  That is neither true nor desirable, unless you use a very specific definition of work.  Let’s take this blog.  No one is forcing me to write it.  For the first year I had something like five readers, most of whom I regularly talked to in person.  Obviously it was motivated entirely internally, which is another way of saying “powered by love.”  And yet, it was still work.  Even if you discount all the reading I did as “things I would have read for fun anyway”*, and the thought I put into it as “a thing I can’t stop my brain from doing”, I have to organize my thoughts and translate them to things other people can understand.  I had to configure the page layout so it was neither hideous nor generic.  I had to proofread and correct mistakes.  I had to retype entries from scratch after WordPress broke again.  I had to correct all the typos Beth pointed out to me after I published.  Nothing past writing the first draft could be considered entertaining the way playing Twenty is entertaining, and even the reading, thinking, and first drafts took considerable time and effort.  That sounds like work to me.  And yet obviously I was doing something I loved because there was no other reason to do it. **

Love doesn’t erase the fact that something is work.  It can motivate the work, it can cushion the annoyances of work, it can give you the incentive to continue when you would otherwise give up, but it can’t erase it.  And I kind of resent attempts to try.  I am a grown up human, I do not need swings or field trips to chocolate factories to trick me into swallowing a pill showing up.

How I feel about office scavenger hunts
The canine equivalent of the company picnic

What I do need is a good working environment, clarity around my goals, and the tools to achieve them.   Those are what let me accomplish things, which is the reward I want from work.  An occasional morale event when I we’re all producing really good work together can be really rewarding, but frequent events (like my job has) when I’m unhappy with my productivity feels like… like eating too much dessert when what I really need is a nutritious meal.  My taste buds notice the sugar but I don’t get any of the associated psychological rewards, and it turns into queasiness.  Speaking of which: office candy counts as entertainment but the nutritious-organic-local-cuddled meals at work are productivity aids.  Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Like 80,000 hours, So Good They Can’t Ignore You has a large emphasis on building career capital.  This section isn’t perfect. A lot of the case studies are opportunistic (in the positive sense of the word), and serendipity is not repeatable.   I feel like it’s skipping a critical step without acknowledging it.  It’s also a little too “be a good worker bee until you’re called up to the the big leagues” for me; traditional corporate or academic paths work for a lot of people and the whole “the only thing holding you back is fear” narrative is stupid, but there’s a lot of other paths to success that get a lot less publicity.  But this was still useful.

I have some topics I find both interesting and skills that would be useful in an associated career.  But as you may have noticed, I have a lot of interests, many of which require expensive, brittle credentials to pursue.  It would suck to spend years in school only to get bored with the field. I highly suspect interests are a better predictor of what will be entertaining than what will be rewarding.  What SGTCIY suggests in this situation (actually all situations, but I think it applies to me more than most) is to build capital in things that will be useful in service to lots of interests/goals.  Like, say, programming, a skill and job I already have but really always skated through on raw intelligence and a willingness to do low status work.  Between this book and not getting a job I really wanted I’ve started make deliberate choices and investing.

It’s also really nice to read a career guide by someone with a career that is not writing career guides (Newport wrote the book in between finishing a computer science PhD and starting a professorship), and one with writing skills to boot.  I finished the book in two days because it was just that readable.

*I used to read things with the explicit goal of blogging about them; they were worth blogging about so rarely I stopped.

**I was planning on using the blog as a portfolio for job purposes, but one of the reasons blogging works as a signal of interest and skill is that it’s so costly and low-reward no one would do it unless they loved it.

Why Open Offices? (synchronicity)

If one person is wrong, they’re wrong.  If a lot of people, some of whom got extremely rich off of their wrong ideas, are wrong, there’s a good possibility I’m the wrong one.  At a minimum, it’s useful for me to understand where I’m differing from others.  Open offices are one such puzzle.  To me, they are obviously one step short of Azkaban.  And yet everyone, including some exceptionally profitable companies, uses them.  Why?

At least Azkaban prisoners get their own cell
At least you get your own cell in Azkaban

[I’m going to restrict myself to tech companies because that’s what I know]

One possibility is some people genuinely prefer them.  I keep talking myself up to that, only to read another article about how everyone is miserable and unproductive in them.  I talk myself up again, and find a peer reviewed study detailing their terribleness.   I thought maybe they were for extroverts, but then I heard extroverts complain they couldn’t get any work done in them either (although they were having a lot more fun not working in them than I was).  My friends’ defenses of them/explanations of how they make it work sound more like Stockholm Syndrome, or at best the way I sound when I find a shortcut to finish a useless but mandatory  30 minute training in 5 minutes.  I noticeably improved my situation relative to the 30 minute scenario, but that doesn’t mean those 5 minutes were valuable.  But let’s assume my friends are a non-random subset and there are people who thrive in (some) open offices.  That’s great, if you hire those specific people.  One of my major frustrations with my current employer, Stark Industries, is that their interview process (closed room, no distractions, puzzles to solve on your own) is designed to filter in exactly people like me, and the work environment (completely open, constant distractions, work that sometimes feels more like being a PM* than a programmer) couldn’t be better designed to make us unproductive.

One possible justification for open offices is cost.  I certainly think that’s a larger factor than many companies admit, but if that were the only concern they’d convert to entirely work from home.  Moreover, engineers are really, really expensive, and making us less productive is costly.  The extra space necessary for doors or cubicles could easily pay for itself.  A slightly different explanation is that even if companies were willing to buy doored offices, acquiring office space is lumpier than hiring.  Having more than you need is expensive and it takes time to ramp up after a hiring spree.  That could explain temporary open offices, or roommates, but not stable ones.

Let’s go back one paragraph.  The open office isn’t the only thing I dislike about Stark Industries.  I’m also continually baffled by the fact that my technology company has a workflow designed around synchronous communication, in person if at all possible.  No one has time to answer email or IM thoughtfully because they’re running from one meeting to another, so if you want a response from someone you schedule a meeting.  The correct response to someone ignoring your e-mail is to ambush them in the hallway or, if they’re at a different site, schedule a videoconference.  It took me a very long time to get this, but making a meeting to do something that could have been handled over email is not a failure mode at Stark Industries.  This is how they expect it to work.  This must be how they want it to work, because instant messaging is a strictly easier technical problem than helicarriers, a project we also do.  Information is exchanged at meetings, which means everyone has to process it at the same time and either everyone moves at the speed of the slowest person* or you leave them behind.

What if the open office and the synchronicity are not a coincidence?  If you believe synchronicity is helpful (which Tony Stark clearly does, and which I agree with in some instances), then you’ll want to encourage it.  But as noted above, this is not the natural mode for a wide swath of programmers.  You can hire for it at first, but eventually that cuts you off from too much talent.  Any one individual can be forced to switch modes by being embedded in a group full of the other, but there aren’t enough synchronizers to absorb all the asynchronizers.

But… as much some people like retreating to do their own thing, they also like it when other people respond to them immediately.  They may be held back by empathy, but they’d still like the answer right away.  In an open office, the barriers to demanding an answer are reduced.  For one, you don’t have to leave your chair.  For two, offices and even cubicles have a sense of personal bubble.  You wait to be invited in, and it’s expected you’ll have to wait until they reach a breaking point.  After extensive experimentation I can tell you there is no way to generate that bubble at Stark Industries, and I assume open offices in general.  I once had a co-worker poke his head into the conference room I was hiding in for the sole purpose of asking if I was hiding so I could concentrate.** Open offices also lower the cost to any one interruption.  They do it by interrupting you so constantly you never get into a groove that could be interrupted, but they do technically lower it.***  So even the highly empathetic will feel less reluctance to interrupt co-workers because they are correctly calculating a lower cost to it.  In high doses, perhaps mixed with morale events and a culture that emphasizes meetings over email, this could lead to teams made entirely of asynchronous workers forcing synchronicity on themselves.

What is it about synchronicity that makes every major tech company started in the last 20 years be willing to pay so much for it?   Based on every survey ever and the coding wars study, it’s not improved performance at the object-level tasks of the job.  But work isn’t school, there’s more to it than fulfilling the terms of the assignment.  Maybe open offices lead to less redundancy or wasted work.  Maybe they make charisma and personal connections less important.  Maybe they’re the best way to force programmers to share information in the face of their steadfast refusal to write anything down.  That not only makes people more potentially more productive, it makes them more replaceable.

Bellatrix screaming in her cell at Azkaban
Look how productive she is

None of this makes me love open offices.  For one I’m pretty sure I’m better at synchronizing via technology than speech.  By a lot.  I love Slack because it gives me everything everyone said I would get from open offices, without any of the costs. It gives me a sense of control and in-touch-ness that makes me want to read it. Meanwhile I approach co-workers in person less now than I did when we all had doors, because I’m hyperconscious of impinging on the other people in the room.  But I will say I started doing better at my job when I acknowledged that I was expected to do it synchronously and rolled with it.  Matching the office work style turned out to be more important to productivity than matching my own.  It exhausts me, but at least it’s the exhaustion of having worked really hard.  When I tried to work asynchronously I came home exhausted from doing nothing, which was a much worse feeling.

*Project/program manager.  Job description depends heavily on the team but one of their jobs is to coordinate people with subject matter knowledge.

*Slowest doesn’t mean dumbest.  They may very well take longer because they’re thinking more deeply.

**The answer was yes.

***The economic term for this is bee sting theory.  You’ll work really hard to avoid your first bee sting, and you’ll pay a lot to get rid of it.  But when you already have 10, the work to avoid an 11th just doesn’t seem worth it.

Links 7/24/15

It’s easy to monetize medication: we have lots of new medications all the time.  There’s no real way to monetize medical or surgical techniques: doctors demonstrated ability to grow people new livers in their lymph nodes 50 years ago, still hasn’t been confirmed, much less adopted.

S.O.R.S– Papers, Please crossed with House.  I was super excited about this game but when I played the demo I quit in frustration.  I probably want to read the story summary instead.

Organism doesn’t let the fact that it’s single celled prevent it from having an eye.

Quick review: prokaryotes are very simple cells, like bacteria.  Eukaryotes are more complicated cells, like plants and animals.  One thing that makes them more complicated is they have organelles- very complicated cellular machinery that are probably descended from other single cell organisms the ancestral eukaryotic cell ate.  Scientists are speculating that the eye is one such organism, and it was probably originally photosynthetic (like the precursor to chloroplasts), but evolved into an eye instead.

Start up advice: “Instead of asking “what problem should I solve?” ask “what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?””

I knew there were sharks that gave live birth, but I thought they were just carrying the egg inside them (meaning the mother gives the fetus all the nutrients it’s ever going to have right at the start). Turns out there are placental sharks (so the fetus is connected to the mother’s blood supply throughout the gestation).  I think this means placentas have evolved more than once.

Binaural Beats

[I hesitated to write this because I don’t want to jinx it.  I’ve only been using it for four days and things have a tendency to stop working for me, but I’m really excited and wanted to share.]

I first heard about binaural beats when a massage place I occasionally go to invited me to Hemi-Sync® weekend workshop, which is the brand name for a particularly well marketed form of binaural beats.  Hemi Sync (short for hemisphere synchronization) sounds extraordinarily made up.  In their own words:

The audio-guidance process works through the generation of complex, multilayered audio signals, which act together to create a resonance that is reflected in unique brain wave forms characteristic of specific states of consciousness. The result is a focused, whole-brain state known as hemispheric synchronization, or Hemi-Sync®, where the left and right hemispheres are working together in a state of coherence. Different Hemi-Sync® signals are used to facilitate deep relaxation, focused attention or other desired states. As an analogy, lasers produce focused, coherent light. Hemi-Sync® produces a focused, coherent mind, which is an optimal condition for improving human performance

The website offers hundreds of (extremely expensive) CDs sorted into categories like “behavior modification”, “cancer support”, “weight control”, “learning and information” and “shamanic”.  The “research article” section has one peer reviewed study, which I found equivocal, and a bunch of self hosted articles.

It seemed so unlikely as to be unworthy of consideration that just listening to sound could force an arbitrary brain to do arbitrary things.  On the other hand, if it was going to work for anyone, it would be me.  I have misophonia, which basically means arbitrary sounds are physically painful.  I don’t know if this is part of the technical definition, but for me sound is also often very attention grabbing when it shouldn’t be.  You know how you involuntarily shift attention when you hear your name across the room?  Imagine if you reacted like that every time anyone spoke.  And you worked in an open office.

Misophonia + sound = chronically activated sympathetic nervous system (the fight/flight/freeze response).  That is an excellent mode to be in if you have encountered a tiger, but a lousy way to spend 80% of your life.  It’s not just that you’re tense and anxious, although those are unpleasant: sympathetic activation directs energy towards tiger-avoidance systems (voluntary muscles, heart, lungs, vigilance) at the expense of long term investments like the immune system, tissue repair, and even digestion.  And it’s self reinforcing, because you become more sensitive to sound as the SNS ramps up.

We know sound can provoke immediate, strong emotional reactions.  Apparently the properties of human screams are wired directly to fear in your brain.   Sound affects how food tastes.  So it doesn’t seem crazy that certain sounds activate or at least facilitate the parasympathetic system.  That would give you an immediate feeling of relaxation, which helps you concentrate and reduces pain, and long term could lead to a greater marginal investment body maintenance, which is good for your health.  It is not as simple as “listen to tape, develop super powers”, but it seemed at least worth trying for me.

This shit is great.

Too soon to say anything about the long term effects, but this is a better muscle relaxant than anything I’ve tried.*  Moreover, it has the largest effect on the muscles that are most tense.  My shoulders and especially my lower back resist massage because pushing on a tense muscle hurts, and whatever gains I do get to be lost very quickly.  My jaw is in a pain<->tension cycle from the nerve damage.  They’re all dramatically better after some time listening to binaural beats, even under adverse conditions like the open office.  I am still kind of dumbfounded that I am getting up from working  in an open office more relaxed than when I sat down.  Actually I’m dumbfounded I’m working in an open office at all, I’ve spent most of my time as a conference room refugee.

So obviously I did get a concentration effect.  The open office is still not my ideal environment, but I can now see why other people called it “not ideal” rather than “Satan’s waiting room”.  It may have tempered my immediate response to noise, but the real gains have been that I recover from disruption much faster, which is exactly what you’d expect from something encouraging the parasympathetic without disabling the sympathetic.

The one thing it doesn’t help me with is sleep.  It’s great for power naps or falling asleep, but I wake up ~40 minutes later.  I have the same problem with meditation, which makes me think listening to these tracks does share qualities with meditaiton.  Speaking of which: I have found binaural sound to be really helpful for meditation- either focusing on the sound itself, or using it as a backdrop for a guided meditation.  Without it, when I meditate I feel simultaneously stuck and unmoored.  With it, I have a sense of flow, and a thing to concentrate on that has no chance of connecting to pain.

You can find a lot of these by searching for binaural or hemi-sync, but so far my favorites are:

I like this one because it has patterns repeating on intervals of different lengths.

Binaural Beat Machine: lets you configure the beat to your exact specification.

There’s also tracks on Google Music and I assume Spotify, although I have no loyalty to any of them.

*Short list: cyclobenzaprine, xanax, massage, acupuncture, various forms of bodywork that get very upset if you call them massage, theanine, magnesium/calcium, warm baths, heating pads.

Meditation

To take a straw yet real example, consider the phrase “mindfulness for sales”.  This is so against the purpose of mindfulness it hurts me.  On an object level you can’t do mindfulness for any particular thing.  Mindfulness gets you in touch with what is already there.  It could help your sales or it could make you realize you hate sales and need to quit today. Your higher brain can choose when to engage in mindfulness when it predicts particular benefits, but if you go into it gunning for a particular outcome you won’t get anything at all.

“Mindfulness for relaxation” is not nearly as bad, but it still bugs me.  You can’t choose what emotion predominates at any given time.  If you have a lot of negative emotions running around (because, say, your nerve damage is acting up and your job pulled you off a useful project where you were learning a lot and pushed you onto a project no one asked for requiring skills you don’t have and aren’t given time to properly learn), mindfulness will be painful.  If you continue through it you may well get that relaxation, but if you’ve been told meditation will be a spa experience you may well give up because apparently you can’t even breathe right.

Just to pick an example.

Being told that strong negative emotions weren’t a sign of failure was really game changing for me.  One, it let me do mindfulness work and get mindfulness benefits out of it, even if they weren’t relaxation.  Two, it enabled me to see why mindfulness wasn’t relaxing for me and look for something that was, which I eventually found.  I’ll talk about that tomorrow, but in case there’s anyone like me that really wants what meditation promises and hasn’t gotten it, I wanted to spread the word.

IQ Tests and Poverty

Recently I read Poor Economics, which is excellent at doing what it promises: explaining the experimental data we have for what works and does not work in alleviating third world poverty, with some theorizing as to why.  If that sounds interesting to you, I heartily recommend it.  I don’t have much to add to most of it, but one thing that caught my eye was their section on education and IQ tests.

In Africa and India, adults believe that the return to education is S-shaped (meaning each additional unit of education is more valuable than the one before, at least up to a point).  This leads them to concentrate their efforts on the children that are already doing the best.  This happens at multiple levels- poor parents pick one child to receive an education and put the rest to work much earlier, teachers put more of their energy into their best students.  Due to a combination of confirmation bias and active maneuvering, the children of rich parents are much more likely to be picked as The Best, regardless of their actual ability.   Not only does this get them more education, but education is viewed as proof one is smart, so they’re double winners.  This leaves some very smart children of poor parents operating well below their potential.

One solution to this is IQ tests.  Infosys, an Indian IT contractor, managed to get excellent workers very cheaply by giving IQ tests to adults and hiring those who scored well, regardless of education.  The authors describe experiments in Africa giving IQ tests to young children so that teachers will invest more in the smart but poor children.  This was one of the original uses of the SATs in America- identifying children who were very bright but didn’t have the money or connections to go to Ivy League feeder high schools.

This is more or less the opposite of how critics view standardized testing the US.  They believe the tests are culturally biased such that a small sliver of Americans will always do better, and that basing resource distribution on those tests disenfranchises the poor and people outside the white suburban subculture.  What’s going on here?

One possible explanation is that one group or the other is wrong, but both sides actually have pretty good evidence.  The IQ tests are obviously being used for the benefit of very smart poor children in the 3rd world.  And even tests without language can’t get around the fact that being poor takes up brainspace, and so any test will systematically underestimate poor children. So let’s assume both groups are right at least some of the time.

Maybe it’s the difference in educational style that matters?  In the 3rd world, teachers are evaluated based on their best student.  In the US, No Child Left Behind codified the existing emphasis on getting everyone to a minimum bench mark.    Kids evaluated as having lower potential than they actually do may receive less education than they should, but they still get some, and in many districts gifted kids get the least resources of any point on the bell curve.

Or it could be because the tests are trying to do very different things.  The African and Indian tests are trying to pick out the extremely intelligent who would otherwise be overlooked.  The modern US tests are trying to evaluate every single student and track them accordingly.  When the SATs were invented they had a job much like the African tests; as more and more people go to college its job is increasingly to evaluate the middle of the curve.  It may be that these are fundamentally different problems.

This has to say something interesting about the meaning of intelligence or usefulness of education, but I’m not sure what.

Links 7/17/15

Butterfly cocoon that thinks it’s a snake.

The bouba/kiki effect: cross-cultural agreement in what certain shapes “sound” like.

US Military released bacteria they thought to be harmless onto an American city.  239 times.  Spoiler alert: was not harmless.  Other people have covered the whole “jesus christ the military proved America was vulnerable to biological warfare by committing biological warfare” part, so I’m going to focus on the harmless part.  The US government, and humans in general, have a nasty tendency to say “harmless” when they mean “you can take it.”  Most humans could shake off the bacteria they were using; it was only a problem in a small portion of the population that couldn’t fight it.  I’ve heard the same thing about the pesticides they used to kill mosquitoes to prevent West Nile: totally harmless because the human liver is amazing, hard on those without that super power.

Opportunistic bacteria aren’t all bad though.  Glow in the dark bacteria saved civil war soldiers from septicemia.

UK government spies on children for thought crime, ends up leaving them vulnerable to hackers.  And by hackers, I mean anyone who attempts the password “password.”

Sydney, my co-organizer for Seattle EA, talks about money, class, and effective altruists.  I was part of the problem here: when people talked about discomfort with the emphasis on money in EA, I assumed they meant donations.  The idea that the money spent during meetings would be an issue literally never occurred to me. Also, with God as my witness, I thought going around saying “la la la everyone’s a programmer la la la is anyone here not a programmer? because that would be notable” was helping.  I think I was trying to avoid the problem of claiming there’s more diversity than there is and overcorrected.  I also think this is a specific instance of the general difficult of owning your advantages without rubbing it in, which is made much more difficult by the fact that one of our goals  is giving people a place to brag about giving.

I find most meat gross, but bacon is an exception.  Unfortunately pigs are really smart, to the point I mostly avoid pork even though I eat other animals. Science is helping me out by investing kelpt that tastes like bacon with a better nutritional profile than kale.  I’m skeptical, because nutrition is part of what generates taste so having that many vitamins should make it taste different, and seaweed usually isn’t 50% fat.  But I’m hoping the collective wishing of everyone reading this will make it so.

80,000 hours says few effective altruists should earn to give as their permanent plan.  I’m a little annoyed that it’s framed as “your beliefs about us are inaccurate” when the truth is more like “we changed our minds”, but if you ignore that it’s good context.  My own take on it is that if the idea of EtG sounds like permission, you should do that.  If it sounds like an obligation keeping you from direct work, EtG is a strong default to occupy you until you have the skills and opportunity to do direct work.

This week’s beautiful gang of theory killed by an ugly gang of facts:  You know that woman who was committed for saying Obama followed her on twitter when he actually did follow her?  The truth is more complicated.  I’m embarrassed to admit this didn’t occur to me.

Life Imitates Coloring Books

Apparently real life is not like Trauma Center and tumors don’t come with fun perforated lines showing you where to cut.

I was shocked too
I was shocked too

Real cancer looks almost identical to the tissue that spawned it, which makes it easy to cut too much or too little.  Luckily, science is on it.  Here is a TED talk by Tal Danino about releasing bacteria that can only live in tumors, and fluoresce when they reach a certain density:

This is meant as a diagnostic tool.  But once you know cancer is there, separating it from the tissue is still an issue.  For that I direct you to Quyen Nguyen’s work with florescent stains.  Her lab produces a variety of stains in different colors which stain different tissues (she demos on cancer and nerves) to show surgeons what to and not to cut

neonnerves

Hey everyone- I’m travelling a lot this week and while I have produced an impressive number of half posts, nothing is quite ready to go.  But! If you are in the SF/Berkeley area, I will be near you for the next few days and we should hang out.  You can email me at elizabeth@ this domain name.

PS. Please don’t rob my house, it would make things weird with my house sitter.