In which I ramble until I run facefirst into Joshu

A few anecdotes:

  1. I recently saw this Twitter thread, which basically said that the standard getting-to-know-you questions (“what do you do?”) are boring and came up with some much more thoughtful alternatives (“what have you been excited about lately?”). I liked Richard’s questions way, way more than the standard ones and was pretty excited to try them out. So I looked at the replies to the tweet and… commenters mostly didn’t like them. Several people said they would come up with an excuse to get out of a conversation with someone who asked them one of these questions and avoid that person for the rest of the party. Huh.

  2. This one happened a couple of years ago: a friend told me a story about how she went hiking out west and left the trail to find a spot to eat lunch. After she’d hiked for a while, she ran into someone who asked her to point them back to the parking lot. This person had gone hiking with no map, no water, and, apparently, no sense of direction or of the landscape, then left the trail to explore. My friend thought this was sort of funny/charming - I thought it was stupid and irresponsible. At the time, I described this to her as a sense that the person didn’t really respect nature.

    A few weeks ago, I discovered the excellent podcast The Emerald and the host, Josh, articulated my feelings about this perfectly. To paraphrase: there’s a modern-day tendency to romanticize nature as beautiful, friendly, and spiritually restorative. But while nature can be all of those things, that’s not all it is. Go anywhere on Earth and you are food. To plants, you’re food once your body decomposes. To animals, you’re food once they’ve eaten you or eaten something that has eaten you. Josh phrased is perfectly: “the forest wants to eat you.” Obviously, that’s not all it wants, but a clear-eyed relationship with nature needs to take this into account.

  3. I got the following story from the ACX Reader Review of The Anti-Politics Machine:

    A number of “development professionals” working for the World Bank decided to modernize the economy of Thaba-Tseka, Lesotho. They noticed that the people of Lesotho spent a lot of time raising cattle and planting crops, but didn’t seem to get a lot of income from selling their excess cattle and crops. Aha! An opportunity to introduce efficient markets! With a little basic infrastructure and economic restructuring, the farmers of Lesotho would be on their way to profitability. Except: it turned out that most of those people weren’t farmers. They were miners, and they kept cattle as part of a complex social system where cattle was mostly non-economic, except as a form of social insurance for those too old to work in the mines. Everyone knew where the market was, how to get there, and even the going rate for cattle - they just weren’t ranchers or farmers. So “developing the cattle market” ended up being one of the many huge wastes of money this project incurred.

  4. This from the Uruk series review of Seeing Like a State. Seeing Like a State is an excellent book and the review is also valuable - I’ll lossily compress them here for brevity. The book is about how large organizations (the author, James C. Scott, focuses on states) need to simplify the world by creating legible abstractions. Governments, for example, ostensibly exist to facilitate human flourishing for their subjects (or, at least, this is the jusitification that seems most right to me). But “human flourishing” is extremely difficult to define or measure even at an individual scale, much less for a city or country. So the state creates abstractions like “the economy,” which is measured by “GDP” (the ideal legible abstraction compresses its target into a single number). Something that resists being compressed into a legible abstraction becomes, in a very real way, invisible to the state.

    An interesting instance of this is evangelical conservatives. This bloc frequently voices their frustration with a decline in “church and family values.” When they do, they are ignored by virtually everyone except for a handful of politicians they elected. Note that this is not true for, eg, teaching creationism in public school, which is a concrete policy position that the state can see. Every now and then, though, someone comes along and says “oh, I know what’s going on here! Evangelical conservatives are upset because of the decline of manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt.” And this gets plenty of attention from the large organizations that drive political discussion in the present day, and we have lots of lively debate about globalism while the evangelical conservatives get increasingly upset because they told us what they’re mad about, they’re mad about God and Family Values, and no one is taking them seriously. If you tell me at this point that actually manufacturing jobs are the problem, you are seeing like a state. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, you understand, it’s just not the only way to see.

And different ways to see are what I’m trying to talk about in this essay. The common thread of these examples is that in each case, someone interacts with their idea of a thing rather than the thing itself, with serious consequences. Our ideas of a thing are usually comprised of all the ways in which that thing looks like something we have experience with - the human brain is an excellent and subtle pattern matcher. In each of the examples I gave above, it’s difficult to see the assumptions you’re making while you’re making them.

For example, I assumed that other people have more or less the same experience of party conversations as I do, because I’m the only person whose internal experience I’ve ever observed at a party. The problem isn’t that the reality isn’t obvious; of course other people experience parties differently than I do, the problem is that it never occurred to me to verify that. Even in the Lesotho example, the reality on the ground about how the Basotho (in case you were wondering about the plural form of “people from Lesotho”) view cattle would have been very obvious to someone who spent some time talking to them; they weren’t hiding anything.

It might be possible, for all I know, to come up with the perfect conversation questions ahead of time. I’m sure a lot of people have tried. I’m equally sure the World Bank has added the Lesotho example to a training PowerPoint somewhere. But I think the better way to go about things is to try to understand a situation on its own terms, which requires you to deliberately undermine your ideas about how it looks or should look. You can feel into where someone wants to take a conversation, or go to Lesotho for a few weeks and talk to the people there before you start trying to “develop” them. If, as you do this, you get obsessed with tiny details, really shake up your pattern matcher by diving into the particulars of this situation that make it unlike any other situation, you might stumble across something you never even knew to look for.

As a post-rationalist rule of thumb, this could probably be condensed as “simple approaches rarely do well in highly situated/contingent environments.” The reasoning behind approaches like looking for little details is that they let you start figuring out the environment instead of engineering an approach so general that it works in all environments. But it’s been phrased more beautifully by Zen Buddhism, which instructs us to always be mindful that we are complete beginners in the present moment, as there has never been a moment quite like this one.

I like the “looking for details” formulation too, though, because it’s something concrete and fun for me to do. When I go for walks, I’ll use an app on my phone to identify whatever plants catch my eye - and I’ve been rewarded with the occasional excitement of discovering shared contexts with a new friend when I recognize a recently learned species in a different place. This has also affected my relationship with “nature,” which is evolving into a number of specific relationships with individual species.

A monk spoke to Joshu, “I have just entered the monastery: please give me some guidance.”

Joshu asked, “Have you had breakfast yet?”

The monk answered, “Yes I have eaten.”

Joshu replied, “Then go wash your bowl.”

And the monk was enlightened.

I don’t want to sell this as a systematic fix. “Looking for details” doesn’t necessarily solve any problems on its own, not least because it doesn’t tell you what details to look for. But it’s something I’ve been thinking about, and I’d like to offer it up as a useful spiritual practice/metasystematic heuristic, whatever suits you best.