The Importance of Habits

Today it struck me that a lot of people get labelled as having 'good memories', or as being 'forgetful' when actually better labels for them might be 'well habituated' and 'badly habituated'.
I suspect a case of missing the symptoms for the diagnosis.
What are the symptoms?

• A failure to act in an expected way.

What is the common diagnosis?

• Forgetfulness

What is my proposed diagnosis?

• Inadequate habituation

Anyone who's seen the movie Memento will know exactly what I mean. The protagonist has no memory, but still manages to live a connected, if crazy, existence through extensive notetaking and self-habituation.
He's an extreme example, in a story. No memory, so he relies on a paper memory (slow!) and some really regimented, strict, habits, which obviously are difficult to train (if you have no memory, how do you keep concentrating on ingraining habits?), but once trained are very handy.
The rest of us are less extreme, but I think the idea still applies.
We do far more things in a day than we could possibly remember to do. I would say that the majority of things we do are habitual, or automatic. Heartbeats are the extreme end of automatic. Breathing is automatic, but we can control it if we choose. Remembering to eat is, for most of us a bit of automatic, a bit of habit and often a lot of headscratching as to what to eat. Keeping appointments can be memory, or if they're regular appointments, then that's liable to be a habit. Watching the news over breakfast, or listening to radio shows, is habitual for many people. You could even argue that driving, typing, riding a bike, are types of habit (after all, if I had to remember to declutch to change gears every time I want to change gears, and remember ever action of that level of detail, then life would surely overwhelm me fast!).
So, if I find myself unable to keep my life under control, is it that I have a bad memory? If most of my actions are significantly based in habit, then I would say no. I would say that I might have a bad memory, but that more importantly I have failed to ingrain useful habits in myself.
But if most of my actions are habitual, and I have failed to ingrain useful habits, what habits do I have? Unuseful ones? That's worrying. How did they get there? Either I put them there (self-destructive? definitely hints at internal contradiction that I might do well to consider), or someone or something else did.
So what habits might society ingrain in us? That's a big question well outside the scope of this little ramble.
But I would say this: habits are most of your life. You'd do well to take a look at yours, and probably intervene. And don't say it's unnatural. Choosing not to choose is a choice. And if we want to take responsibility for ourselves, and I think we should, then we should make our choices with open eyes.

And lastly, a little glimpse of the world of expert habituation. As a human being, most of our habits are small scale, like reading, or catching buses or whatever. Many of our larger scale actions, like writing essays, choosing the course of a season, year or career, or developing relationships or whatever, are often not habitual: we deliberately and consciously do them.
I would argue that the most 'effective' people can make habits of even the most large-scale actions of their lives. They intervene not by directing their actions at a fine-grained level, but merely by constraining their habits this way and that.
I think this could be a glimpse of the effortless life. Phrased in terms of high-order habituation.
And of course there's a flipside. With habituation comes the closing of doors: every time you habituate yourself, that's an action that you'll commit in preference to others that you're not habituated to.
So it makes sense to choose your habits carefully. And choose enabling, rather than overly narrowing habits. And if you can, habits that you can switch on and off as the situation dictates.
But not enough habits is disaster. You'll get hopelessly bogged down.

new books

There was a big booksale on today, which I went to, and bought some books. But not as many as I thought I might.
My attitude to books has changed interestingly over the last few years.
Now that my reading list is longer than I can reasonably expect to ever get through, and there is so much reading material freely available, and other media that I want to absorb, it no longer seems worth just buying anything vaguely interesting looking. I've come to realise that the probability of actually reading the book, or being able to use it some other way (such as giving it away, or lending it out) is very important too.
So, this is what I came out with today, along with why:

• Collins Gem Weather - a guide to interpreting the sky, and what it's done, is doing, and is likely to do. This would be a nice skill to have, especially as I never watch the weather, and I like to cycle. I bought this book in order to increase my natural intepretive skills.
• The Tough Guide To Fantasy Land - This is basically a glossary of roleplaying terms and culture I think. I bought this book because it looks simple to read, reasonably entertaining, but mainly because it should give me a better understanding of role-playing, and hence one of my best friends. I bought this book in order to understand someone else.
• Nobody's Child - This is a book of Kate Adie's experiences of orphans. I have a lot of respect for Kate Adie, and I don't know much about orphans. I bought this book to learn more about Kate Adie, and through her, humanity.
• The Kindness of Children - The premise of this book is: 'Are children wiser about the nature of kindness than we think they are?' I don't think my society has the right attitude to children, hence books like this that challenge the social outlook seem likely to me to be good sources of truth and wisdom. I bought this book to learn more about humanity, and what humanity could be.
• The Christmas Mystery - Jostein Gaarder, writer of Sophie's World, writes well, thoughtfully and entertainingly. I haven't been reading enough fiction lately either, which has been tiring me out I think. Also, Sophie's World connects back to an important time in my past: reading this might reveal/grow some important links, and enable some sort of progression. I bought this book to relax with, and help set my life in better context.
• Salam Pax, The Baghdad Blog - A text that I'd like to have about me simply because I think it has historical importance: the emergence of independent internet journalism via blogging. Also, I expect there's some pretty interesting stuff in here concerning the situation in Iraq. I bought this book as a historical memento, and to flesh out my impression of the Iraq conflict.
• Teach Yourself PR - I bought this book because having a better working knowledge of PR should let me interact with PRed organisations more effectively. In a world where big organisations impact our lives a lot, this should be a useful skill.
• Tales From Earthsea - This was on my to buy list already: I read the first three Earthsea books already, and loved them, and they influenced me significantly. I bought this book to continue an ongoing thread of my life, be entertained and thought provoked. Ursula K Le Guin is an awesome writer and thinker. Anything she's written is on my reading list.
  
• Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance - I loved Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I am involved with keeping chickens, so this seems like a nice book to have. I bought this book to see how I align with the rest of the chicken keeping community, and hopefully to get a better feeling for the relationship between humans and other animals.
• Sufi - Family friends raised Sufism in my consciousness recently, and got me interested. I know next to nothing about Sufism, so I bought this book to increase my awareness of humanity, and its customs.

So there we are. A whole bunch of books, motives, and future reading for me...

Tagging

Tagging is a very common feature in various database type applications nowadays. It's very tempting to try and use it as a hierarchical or disjoint categorisation tool, but this is obviously flawed! I have tried to use tags as such, but it doesn't work well, and breaks the real idea of what tagging is about.
Tagging is supposed to be haphazard and instinctive. If you scatter many tags everywhere, and use the tags, you will naturally settle into a vocabulary that unlocks a lot of extra information from your database, whether you're using a personal or a social tagging system.
A small number of well chosen tags that has the effect of causing a hierarchy or a disjoint categorisation reduces your flexibility in choosing tag names in the future, and makes things needlessly constrained.
As concerns social categorising systems, maybe we need parallel systems: tagging, hierarchies, sets and more. The more ways we have to link up data, the more useful it is I would say!

A Go Game

What sort of game do I want? I see the beginning of the Go game as a conversation, where I decide with my partner what sort of game I want to play.
Do we want to play a standoffish game of opaque strategy, do we want to have a singleminded scrap across the whole board. Do we want to play similar styles, or pit different styles against each other? Do we want to cooperate, or argue? Do we want to experiment with new ideas, refine developing skills, or exercise prior knowledge? What combination of these things do we want to do?

So, the opening is like a statement of policy. After that, the outward aim of the game is to see whose policy works the best. Go's excellent handicapping property (it's too basic and intrinsic to be called a rule) is such that the strength of the players should only be a factor in the choice of policy, not a decider of the outcome of the game. (Unless the strength gap is too great, in which case teaching games are more appropriate.)
Go helps you realise your own strength, not waste it, and not have a false impression of it. If you adopt policies that you don't have the strength to follow up, you lose. But if you adopt policies that you easily have the strength to follow up, if the handicap was set correctly, you will lose because you wasted your stones.

If your strategies turn out to be ineffective, you have to find the agility to move onto effective strategies. Go is full of balances like this.

Maybe I will play an inflexible strategy in the hope that it is one my opponent doesn't know and will lose to. Maybe I will try and play as flexibly as possible, partly to hide my lack of a plan, and partly to be ready for unexpected events. Good go is a combination of all these things. And the size of the goban means you can adopt a varying mix of these in different places on the board.

So by the midgame the strategies are decided, there is no more room to change them (barring swindles). It is up to both players to follow through with the promises they made at the beginning. If they don't, they lose.

If the handicap was right, and both players made good choices, the result may be a draw. The endgame is an opportunity to avoid a draw by making up points in the last little fights over small amounts of remaining territory.

So perhaps one view of Go is this. The opening is a gamble. Do you have the skill to pull off the strategy you want to use in order to win? Do you want to win on the strategy, or rely on using superior strength to take a big swing in the midgame, or do you want to make it a close game and take the win with little points in the endgame?
Because stones are played in turns, both players base their decisions on the intentions the other communicates through their stones.
Once the bets have been made, they have to be tested. As the game progresses there is less and less opportunity to change your bets, and you are forced to follow them through.
By the endgame, both players are scraping up the last points, either to emphasize or blunt a victory, or to snatch one.
Gamble, prove, scrape.

An ideal game of Go is a draw: both players chose appropriate strategies for their skills, the handicap was correct, and neither could break the others choices. Because the skill of individuals varies widely and according to context, and because the available strategies and tactics in Go are so great, this means that in reality the game may not always be a draw. A well balanced game that isn't a draw and where no mistakes were made represents both players exploring new territory. A well balanced, flawless game that is a draw represents both players practicing on charted territory.

A good Go player works a balance between practice and exploration. In a full-size game there is often opportunity to do both.

Go has very much depth!

Bearing all that in mind, playing Go against a computer is quite strange, especially when it's better than you! It's as if the computer is beating me at a Turing test.
Once you've gotten over the weirdness of taking a game against a computer seriously enough to play properly, the fact that it's actually better than you is quite interesting. (Remember that number crunching is not a big item in the armoury of a Go player). Perhaps this is the one way in which a computer can actually teach me (albeit only for the beginning stages), rather than merely being a portal through which I view information.

Martial Arts, Games and Learning

A common criticism of martial arts (as studied by the layperson, rather than the military etc.) is that 'the moves would never help you in a real fight'. This has never been a problem for me. My reason for training is not to obtain fighting skills as quickly as possible, but to gradually obtain movement skills and gain mastery over my body (in a less domination-centric terminology: to unite my mind with my body) over a long timescale.
So although the things I'm learning currently won't help me out in a mugging, they might help me use my body with more awareness and care, for myself and others. Perhaps I'll drive more safely, not push myself or others beyond our limits, and grow older with better health, etc.
I'll be fitter, mentally and physically, and a more effective member of society than I otherwise would have been.
So, my message to the martial artists who want to fight: Give up martial arts. Get out onto the streets and get into fights. That's how to learn to fight. You'll make the 'right' friends, and be engaging in the right activities to do 'well' in real fights.
To the martial artists: Perhaps you will be a better fighter eventually. But I think that's missing the point. Your martial art can be of far more value to you in your everyday life.
I'm sure many people understand this, but I think many don't as well.
The reason the moves we learn (at the beginning stages) in martial arts wouldn't help in a real fight is that they're very contrived. Both parties have to cooperate a lot in order to make the first steps in learning. What do these contrived moves do? They give us a sense of what's possible, extend what's possible, and allow us to practice and develop fundamentals that will be useful in a freer context.
I am discovering the same thing in maths and Go. Although a game of Go is almost infinite in its possibilities, without a study of the fundamentals, the range of accessible possibilities is much reduced. And maths is so open-ended that you can wander round in circles forever unless you impose some sort of order on your endeavours somehow.
And to take it to its extreme: life is the most open-ended chance anyone ever gets. To fail to transfer the lessons learned from more restricted activities would be to close off the possibilities of the universe!
I never knew a board game could be so illuminating. Perhaps it takes a board game like Go. (And stepping stones, in the form of maths and martial arts...)

lines of enquiry

Yesterday I visited Kettle's Yard to see an exhibition called 'Lines of Enquiry', containing images created by non-artists for various purposes. It really opened my eyes to the value of drawing and related skills. And the vast array of purposes that such skills can be put to. It's easy to think that artistic activities are segregated from clearly utilitarian, practical and scientific endeavours. This exhibition really showed how both can really benefit from each other. Perhaps it's simpler to see that the distinction is actually artificial, and that by doing away with it, freedom of expression is increased.
It's easy to miss out on visual representations in every day life. Browsing through this exhibition gave me the resolve to get back into drawing again.
One thing I am sure of is that failing to communicate visually is missing out on a dimension of life with huge potential.
What role does visual representation play in your life?
Definitely a line of enquiry to follow up.

decaying filesystems

Wikipedia is a big collection of interconnected articles, each with its own edit history.
If we view each article+history as one object, then it will come as no surprise that links between articles link to the most recent version of the article.
But if instead we view each version of an article as a separate article, a different view comes out. Instead of wikipedia being a big collection of interconnected articles, we have a big collection of interconnected stacks of articles, where each stack represents the article and its previous versions.
Now why do links between articles automatically point to the 'top of the stack'? The article may be changed out of all recognition from what it was further down the stack (earlier in its history).
In fact, we arrive right at the paradox of the heap: when does an article undergoing many small incremental changes actually cross the boundary between being a modification of its earlier self to being a totally new article?
The answer is of course, that it doesn't. The boundary is entirely artificial, and almost entirely not useful.
So this is the fix: wikipedia article links should link through to the version of the article that is relevant to the text linking to it. Intuitive no?
This leads to some nice behaviours: because links can be redirected to different versions of an article you know you're pointing at what you intended to point at. Also, there is more emphasis on the age and stability of the information you're viewing.
But perhaps it would be tedious to have to keep updating links as articles improved over time. Perhaps there could be mechanisms that tracked people's browsing paths and updated links automatically. Or perhaps it would form the basis of a new recommendation system: major edits would gain approval from the community by getting linked to.
This system also suggests another improvement: branching articles. Each modification to an article is actually a branch. Vandalized branches would soon die, while community-approved branches would blossom.
You could even have a system whereby short branches with low link counts (or a high proportion of links from ancient but successful branches, representing abandoned links) could be migrated to lower quality media, or even disposed of: a sort of garbage collection for high-level human-readable information.
Branches are also excellent in that they solve the article renaming, moving, merging and splitting problems at a stroke: because the mechanisms to redirect links quickly are already in place, it is comparatively cheap to perform these operations.
The possibilities are endless. And it would be a job to get right, but it's something we could benefit from a lot I think.

the democratisation of programming

Sitting at work browsing through code and documentation recently, I came to the realisation that computer programming is easier now than it has ever been. Programming languages are more accessible, development environments increasingly more cuddly, and the number of prefabricated parts has exploded.
So now any Tom, Dick or Harry can program.
And what's more, almost any Tom, Dick or Harry can create his or her own programming languages and environments, which has happened more than successfully on more than one occasion.
This is simultaneously very good and very bad.
Lowering the barrier to entry deconcentrates power out of the hands of few. But it also heavily dilutes the skill of the few in the incompetence and mediocrity of the many. When programming was hard, incompetence was weeded out by 'natural selection'. Now incompetence is rife. And for the beginner, wading through all this crud can be quite uncomfortable. And potentially damaging. When you're developing on top of broken items, it's easy to fall into a broken rut yourself.
The solution? Keep your eyes open at all times, and question everything.
Having said that, I did read an interesting article recently about how 'Worse is better'. But I think that's definitely a case of breaking the rules once you know them.

originality isn't new

How often have you sat down to write an essay only to stall right in your tracks because you felt like you were sitting down to write the same old essay that a thousand people had already written?
I know I have many times. It can be a real motivation killer. Which is why I decided to look into the situation a little further. And it turned out to be quite simple. I simply had, and have, no desire to tell people something that they already know. What would be the point in that?
Retelling old stories to people who have already heard them sounded like an easy route to a nice boring reputation. Rewriting old thoughts in fresh ink felt like a sure way to lodge deeper into whatever philosophical rut I’d been trapped in recently. Using the present to recycle the past seemed like a rather sad waste of an opportunity.
Striving for originality can be a very positive drive. If we were all content with reinventing the wheel and rediscovering fire we might never have invented styling mousse or electric toothbrushes. But sometimes originality can get in the way of itself. And all kinds of other innocent bystanders.
Often what is needed is not a new solution, but just a logical application of an old one. And if you have no knowledge of applying old solutions to easy problems, what chance have you got of finding new solutions to new problems?
Originality is a faraway objective that would be nice to achieve, but realistically speaking, isn’t usually. But that sounds rather negative.
What people mean when they say ‘original’ is hazy. Sometimes they mean in relation to the history of humanity. Sometimes they mean in relation to a current trend of thinking. But usually the scope is pretty wide.
I think we can achieve originality if we narrow the scope a little. If I want I can do something original, in relation to me and my history, every day of the week. And from there I can widen out my originality if I want. At least I have a foot in the door of Originality’s home, where before I was fixated by the ‘Beware Of The Dog’ and ‘We’re Not Buying It’ stickers.
So the moral of the story is, sit down, write your essays, explore your thoughts, and tread those ruts ever deeper, because one day you’ll find that either they go exactly where you wanted to go, or, more exciting still, you’ll find that they run out and you have to forge a new path for yourself!
And of course, even old ruts have rough edges which you can smooth or roughen as your mood takes you.
Whatever you do, don’t be intimidated by the towering monster that is ultimate originality. You’ll never come close to it if you don’t start on its minions first!