

Are you thinking, or are you farting? - ahoyhere
http://slash7.com/articles/2009/6/10/are-you-thinking-or-are-you-farting

======
swombat
_It's a cycle of awesomeness._

I'm not convinced... It's an interesting article, but it seems to me this
cycle can just as easily devolve into mental masturbation. "I'm thinking X. Am
I thinking this because Y or Z? What's the meaning of thought anyway?" Keep
doing this for too long and you might turn into some kind of philosopher.

Now, I agree that some self-examination is essential (as Socrates put it, the
unexamined life is not worth living), but I'd argue that what's needed is a
balance between thinking and doing. And doing requires putting aside all those
fabulous thoughts and focusing on the task at hand for a while.

The two are not exclusive, nor is one superior to the other. They are a bit
like Reason and Passion in Khalil Gibran's writings
(<http://www.katsandogz.com/onreason.html>):

 _Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring
soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and
drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone,
is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its
own destruction. Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of
passion, that it may sing; And let it direct your passion with reason, that
your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix
rise above its own ashes._

 _I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would
two loved guests in your house. Surely you would not honour one guest above
the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of
both._

 _Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars,
sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows -- then let your
heart say in silence, "God rests in reason." And when the storm comes, and the
mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty
of the sky -- then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion." And
since you are a breath in God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too
should rest in reason and move in passion._

~~~
kirse
_"I'm thinking X. Am I thinking this because Y or Z? What's the meaning of
thought anyway?"_

In the thought example about the "Milk" in the article I found myself asking
"Who does that?" and now I'm wondering if that helps further explain to me how
women tend to think into things.

I'm curious to know here who would have gone onto thought #3 in the milk
example? If I'm enjoying something I'm simply enjoying it... I'm not trying to
determine if I'm _really_ NOT enjoying it and thus trying to convince myself
that I AM enjoying it.

~~~
ahoyhere
Haven't you ever come out of a situation and, at the end, when it was all said
and done, realized that you had talked/fooled yourself into it?

Self-congratulatory tones can be indicators of something that is _very bad_.

It's important to not get high on your own supply. A lot of what we tell
ourselves is wrong, or at least misguided. If you question your own intentions
and observations, you can avoid making big mistakes.

For example, I know lots of people who tell themselves "I didn't get what I
want because x." where x is something that is obviously completely beyond
their control, and therefore not their problem/responsibility.

But if you want to protect your ego, telling yourself that it's because of
x-ism is totally effective. It also cripples you.

Which is why you have to ask yourself, "What's my motive here?" and "What do I
have to lose if I think about it from a different perspective?"

Also, considering most of the people who have promoted self-examination and
self-understanding over the years have been men, your bit about women is
somewhat disingenuous.

~~~
kirse
_\-- Haven't you ever come out of a situation and, at the end, when it was all
said and done, realized that you had talked/fooled yourself into it?_

No. Before I ever enter a situation I already know whether or not I need to
convince myself. I'm pretty aware of my own intuition, and the more I need to
"talk myself" into doing something the more I'll question myself before I skip
over my gut instinct.

It's been extremely rare when I've come out of a situation where I trusted my
intuition and been unhappy with the result. On the other hand, I've had many
times where I overrode my intuition and thought "damn, should have trusted
myself"

 _\-- It's important to not get high on your own supply._

I don't. It's called being proactive and is functionally similar to the
techniques of mindfulness. Steven Covey writes about it in his first chapter
of "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". And please, entrepreneurs ignore
reality more than most people I've ever known. Start up a business against all
odds... convincing yourself to keep going with an idea even though you haven't
succeeded after years? How is that _NOT_ being high on your own supply?

 _\-- If you question your own intentions and observations, you can avoid
making big mistakes._

This is the big fallacy of questioning your every thought and intention. If
_only_ I could just monitor every thought, every motive, question my every
step, then I could do it perfectly -- I would avoid the big mistakes. Wrong.
You might have perfectly reasoned every thought, justified every intention,
and still fail simply because you didn't have all the information.

So with that in mind, that's why it's much better to simply DO. Ensure one's
intuition is in agreement and then DO, don't think into it. Mistakes are going
to happen anyway, and that's when you'll do the reflecting.

~~~
CodeMage
_\-- If you question your own intentions and observations, you can avoid
making big mistakes._

 _This is the big fallacy of questioning your every thought and intention. If
only I could just monitor every thought, every motive, question my every step,
then I could do it perfectly -- I would avoid the big mistakes. Wrong. You
might have perfectly reasoned every thought, justified every intention, and
still fail simply because you didn't have all the information._

I like to compare this to Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. No matter how
much we examine our thoughts, we're still applying the same brain to them. You
might hope to catch some of the problems by applying second, third and fourth
thoughts to your first thoughts, but there's bound to be a flaw you can't work
around, "an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in theory"
;)

~~~
ahoyhere
The "You" that is doing the analyzing can obviously learn and grow...
otherwise, what's the point of doing anything?

And, if you read the original article, you'll see it's not about "catching
problems" at all.

~~~
CodeMage
See, that kind of hostile attitude is what usually turns people away from any
advice you might offer. Your assumption that I haven't read the article --
because my wording of my interpretation of it differs from what you expect --
is unwarranted.

The article itself was rather interesting and I certainly didn't mean to imply
that metacognition is useless. From my point of view, not engaging in any
metacognition ever will eventually lead to what I call problems, among which
are unwarranted assumptions and failure to consider alternatives. Those are
"problems" that I like to "catch" and correct in my own thinking. However, I
do believe that one has to draw a line somewhere; otherwise, one risks
indulging in what another commenter named "mental masturbation".

As for personal growth, I believe there will always be limits to our thinking
that cannot be (directly) surpassed by more thinking ;)

~~~
ahoyhere
I didn't intend to sound hostile. I think we're talking past each other here
:)

Also, I agree with you 100% on mental masturbation. (I also blog occasionally
@ <http://www.justfuckingship.com/>). But I _am_ tired of every freakin web
app looking, acting, and being essentially the same.

We also define problems differently. I think it's a bigger issue that all web
app are basically the same, than if a given individual sits and thinks _too
hard_ and never does anything. But that's because I have barely any problems
with executing any more... because I've worked on it.

Have you heard of the categorization of failures?

Failure Level 1 - Doing the right thing, but doing it badly.

Failure Level 2 - Doing the wrong thing, whether you do it well or badly.

I mostly like to poke people about Level 2. No blog/article/motivational
speaker/whatever can do _everything_ so I pick my battles :)

------
abstractbill
_Thought 1: I want to make a forum. Here's how I will make the front page that
lists all the forums, making it clean and easy to see the most popular stuff,
even if it's older...

Thought 2: But wait. Do I need a front page that lists all the forums? Am I
optimizing instead of thinking?

Thought 3: Are forums really the right tool for the job?

Thought 4: How would I recognize the right tool for the job? What does
communication mean? How does this change on the internet?_

I do this, but unlike the author I've come to regard it as generally a bad
habit. Too much thinking gets in the way of _doing_. These days I try to avoid
over-thinking everything, and concentrate on just making something - anything,
and seeing what happens when I launch it.

~~~
sfphotoarts
this is sometimes a good idea, sometimes not (think Space flight, for
example).

The current thinking, probably stemming from Google's design-by-stats
methodology is that this scales down to startups, you build something and
morph it based on feedback. We used to call that design by committee, but
clearly when you give it a new name its a different animal :)

I think what's more likely to have happened is that the problems have changed
from things like best way to compress these bytes, faster state machine for
this network stream, better LCS algorithm to find my n-gram etc, to problems
that involve many social factors for their success. When this happens the only
way to find those factors is to involve the social community that is creating
them. Often those doing the iteration/refine cycle with the developers are not
the same as those ultimately using a product, but when it works, it works
well.

Software is seeing a shift towards large scale problems, like making the
accumulated history of mankind available to anyone, anywhere; or supporting
complex life decisions; or connecting and staying connected with multiple
disparate sets of 'friends, etc. These are radically different problems being
solved in different ways.

But not every problem is solved best this way.

------
noonespecial
Link broken (goes to edit login). Try here:

<http://slash7.com>

~~~
Jem
Or [http://slash7.com/articles/2009/6/10/are-you-thinking-or-
are...](http://slash7.com/articles/2009/6/10/are-you-thinking-or-are-you-
farting) for the direct link :)

------
wallflower
Tangentially related. Asking "Why 5 times"

"Taiichi Ohno is known to have said that "having no problems is the biggest
problem of all." He viewed problems not as a negative but as a "Kaizen
opportunity in disguise." Whenever problems arose, he encouraged his staff to
investigate the problem at the source and to as "ask ‘why’ five times about
every matter"

[http://www.shmula.com/382/ask-why-five-times-about-every-
mat...](http://www.shmula.com/382/ask-why-five-times-about-every-matter)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys>

~~~
sfphotoarts
5, of course, being utterly arbitrary, and even when it does work, its largely
luck. Root cause analysis is a science, why5 is guess work, done 5 times.

------
KazamaSmokers
Are we human, or are we dancer?

~~~
ahoyhere
Arggggh, why did you have to bring that up? I'm going to have to drink it out
of my head later today.

------
blackdog
observation without judgment seems very similar to the idea of mindfulness
explored in vipassana meditation.

~~~
ahoyhere
Yes, vipassana meditation changed my life.

But I want to follow Terry Pratchett's lead and teach unobtrusively. He's
really good at it. So, as a step 1, I didn't ever use the words Buddhism or
meditation.

~~~
blackdog
enlightenment on the down-low! Sneaky.

------
ahoyhere
Oh my god, I'm an idiot. That'll teach me to try to use a utility for multiple
clipboards. :(

Yes, the direct link is

[http://slash7.com/articles/2009/6/10/are-you-thinking-or-
are...](http://slash7.com/articles/2009/6/10/are-you-thinking-or-are-you-
farting)

D'oh.

~~~
Xichekolas
I assume one of the editors will fix it at some point... or you could
resubmit.

~~~
swombat
It's already accumulated a fair few comments, I don't think resubmitting would
be appropriate.

