A brief teaser on this weekend.

It was a cliff. As cliffs go, it was pretty small, no more than six meters. But it was a landslide cliff, about 60°, sharp broken shale all the way down to the water's edge at the bottom.

The front tire slipped. I went over.

A dilemma of an optimal experience

I'd really like to go to tonight's Ignite Seattle, but after this weekend I'm so exhausted I don't know that I'd have the mindpower to keep up for the full two-hour experience, especially not if there's alcohol involved.

I really need to get out more. I've been hermiting, bad, and barely associating with the people I see regularly. I've been reading Seth Robert's list of optimal experiences, in which he lists social experiences, along with experiencing hunger, family, sunlight, face-to-face contact, and being listened to as part of his daily optimal allowances.

Sadly, I think the tiredness and achiness of surviving this weekend will take precendence.

Jawdrop insight...

I've been working this week with Myles Braithwaite's Django Tumblelog (and doing some heavy-duty surgery on it) and James Tauber's Django-Friends, when I suddenly realized something: if you replace the explicit User object in Friends with a generic object, you suddenly have an entire framework for expressing an interest in, not just what other people do, but in everything that happens within a given system.

You have a better social network engine than Pinax.

You could build friendships on top of this model. You could build a hell of a lot of things-- not all of them efficiently-- on the basic idea that "object A is interested in object B."

Re-assembling my fragmented mind, part 1.

Nicholas Carr has set off quite the firestorm. I've now been asked by no fewer than four people to comment on his original piece, Is Google Making us Stupid?, and his follow-on book, The Shallows. Since Carr's initial toss of the intellectual grenade there have been many articles responding to it or agreeing with it, most notably the NY Times article Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price. that chronicled one exceptionally net-addicted man's struggle to balance his addiction with his family.

(As an aside, I should add that I think the NY Times article is tragically named, and Carr's attitude is correct. It is not "gadgets" that are the problem. It is access to a nigh-infinitude of data that is the problem. And not just any data, but the short, intense, ready-to consume McNuggets of data that are the Internet.)

I'm going to start somewhere else. I'm going back to Daniel Kahneman's popular lecture, The Riddle of Experience Vs. Memory. Something about Kahneman's lecture bugged me, and the best I could articulate was that Kahneman used "planning for a vacation" as his explanatory metaphor. Kahneman asserts that we have two selves-- an experiencing self, that leaps at opportunities because you know the experience will be worthwhile, and the remembering self, that informs you because you have done things that are worthwhile.

Planning is an anticipatory activity. Where, in Kahenman's lecture, was the "anticipating self?" Where was the future tense in Kahneman's vision?

I was extremely pleased to learn that Philip Zimbardo, the famous research psychologist, has addressed exactly this question in his own lecture, from the Royal Science Academy (which is pretty damn quality stuff, and lacks some of TED's pretention), entitled "The Secret Powers of Time."

Zimbardo's formulation is that we can divide humans, and cultures, into backward-looking, present-looking, and forward-looking. Along another axis, Zimbardo suggests we think of these as divided further into postive or negative camps, but those are mostly people-driven, not culturally driven. Catholic countries, Zimbardo points out, are mostly past-driven: tradition, family, and the source of "slow" movements (slow food, slow cities, etc.). Protestant countries, in contrast, are forward-driven: hard work now for payoff in the future. But it's not just about a single religious divide: whole cities in America can be separated into "backward" and "forward" without regard to their religious make-up.

(Zimbardo's formula says that backward-looking people can either be joyed by their memories, or filled with regrets. Thus, Kahneman's formula about "those who are consumers of their memories" becomes more of a cultural phenomenon than it does a personal one. I find this entirely plausible.)

Zimbardo's analysis indicates that schooling is all about forward-looking. You're passive, you're not in control, and you're being told that this is all for your own benefit. (I could argue that backward-looking schooling is all about inculcating youngsters with respect for the traditions, a "This is how we've always done things and it's always worked out for us.")

Zimbardo takes this further and basically overlaps with Carr's analysis when he points out that the average male teenager, by the time he reaches 21, has played over 10,000 hours of video games, the best of which are highly tuned to keep you playing with suped-up reward systems absolutely designed to keep you primed, hooked, and only intermittenly rewarded. (See Cracked's Five Creepy Ways Video Games are Trying to Get You Addicted for a list of the common techniques, and how the combination of high-end programming, sufficient asset management, and good video resolution have combined to give game designers a quite scary toolbox.) But more than that, despite the addiction feature, the player still feels like he's absolutely in control. It starts when he wants it to, it ends when he wants it to. He can save and reset at any time.

Zimbardo says, "All addictions are addictions of present hedonism." As the Cracked article mentions above, "A whole lot of the 'guy who failed all of his classes because he was playing WoW all the time' horror stories are really just about a dude who simply didn't like his classes very much. This was never some dystopian mind control scheme by Blizzard. The games just filled a void." But young men, Zimbardo points out, are dropping out of school at the highest rate ever. Why? Because school is boring: it requires concentration and depth, something that 10,000 hours of video games (and that's just games by the way; it doesn't include instant messaging, web surfing, and maybe even watching porn). Television at least taught passivity; video games reward you for being active, and sometimes clever, but only in a shallow way, and never, ever do they reward you for introspection.

I'm convinced that Zimbardo has it essentially right: our institutions were designed to direct people into channels that either maintained functional traditions or forged forward-looking innovations. In this way, each generation prevented the next from the frittering away lives lost in hedonism, or surrendered to fatalism. This channelling is quite hard to do: we are all born present-tense hedonists ("I want that nipple, that toy, that blanket!"), the immediate world is extremely attractive to young people, we evolved to deal with immediate threats. Long-term thinking is possible but evolutionarily it's a late-comer to consciousness. Teaching kids that comfort and successs come from the other two modes is essential.

Video games are the current extreme of immediate, rewarding experiences that are wholly without real apparent risk. That's an insanely potent combination And I do think they're rewiring our brains in ways that are not wholly useful or conducive to the long-term success of our society.

Next: But what about the Internet?

(There. I've managed to glue together the whole Nicholas Carr "The Internet is Ruining our Minds" with Zimbardo, Kahenman, and Cracked Magazine. In the next post, I'll glue together these lessons with Roger Ebert, Buddhism, Alain de Botton, The Economist magazine, and eventually we'll circle back to Carr.)