Colin Wright's Blog, page 15

Mere Persistence

Strength, fortitude, gutsiness, grit, dynamism, determination, purposefulness, brilliance, courage; these are all wonderful traits to have, whether you’re hoping to accomplish a personal goal or produce something of value.

Also vital, though, and often under-appreciated, is the importance of just showing up and continuing to do something over and over again for an extended period of time.

Mere presence and participation are seldom celebrated or sexy. Staunchness doesn’t tend to earn accolades, and...

Embraces & Barriers

If you find yourself in a dangerous environment, there are two primary paths you can take to reduce the potency of those dangers: you can build barriers between yourself and the threats, and you can acclimate yourself to them.

The barriers we might build range from weapons to clothing to artificial shelters. These are all things that other creatures also make for themselves, but we humans are particularly good at tool-making.

Acclimation generally takes quite a bit more time, but it also d...

Habit Pairs & Poka-Yokes

There’s a fair amount of effort required to instigate change in our lives, and maintaining change over time often requires additional mental effort.

Some behavioral changes stick because there are no alternatives, or because they’re latently enjoyable, but many adjustments of this kind require conscious, deliberative motivation, and that motivation is psychologically costly.

Research has demonstrated that what’s often called “pairing” or “stacking” can help us stick to new habits after the...

Modest Control

The degree to which we feel we’re in control of a situation can influence the way we feel about that situation.

This is often true superficially, in the sense that it can be comforting to have our hands on the wheel compared to careening through unfamiliar terrain while in the passenger seat. But research has also shown that our sense of control can influence everything from our self-reported levels of happiness, to our degrees of depression, to our lifespans.

More control over our lives i...

Updating Priors

In the world of statistical inference, a “prior” refers to the beliefs we have about a particular value before we have all the data.

In practice, this means that if we’ve done all the calculations required to ship a batch of a particular product from warehouses to grocery stores, but then discover that the product actually weights three ounces more than we were originally told, it’s important that we go back through all of our calculations and change them based on this updated information.

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Curated Inputs

I spend a significant amount of time each day parsing information. This informs my work, but it also informs my thinking. It requires a decent amount of time and energy, but I consider that time and energy to be an investment: it helps me grow, and it helps me do work I enjoy.

That said, filtering and focus are vital to this effort, allowing me to glean more of the valuable bits—the signal— from the global info-stream, and less of the noise that would otherwise overload my inputs.

My speci...

Returning to Why

Many of us, at some point in our lives, have reason to pause, take stock, and ask ourselves why we’re doing what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it the way we doing it.

This can lead to sudden pivots, educational missteps, valuable recalibrations, and fundamental changes in the way we perceive ourselves.

There are externally catalyzed milestones that can trigger such moments—quarter- and mid-life crises come to mind—but it’s possible to instigate such thinking intentionally, as well.

D...

Background Issues

Human beings are drawn to the unusual and sensational.

It’s baked into how we process the world: something that seems to have changed, and which is new and dramatic in some way, will almost always capture our attention and concern more than something expected, ordinary, and casually foreseeable.

This is part of why we’re often negligent when it comes to the maintenance of existing, fundamental, immensely valuable infrastructure, but willing to throw limitless time and money at untested, ne...

Habit, Ritual, Performance

The word “ritual” is derived from the word “rite,” which refers to a religious ceremony of some kind.

Which makes sense, if you consider that a ritual is typically a somewhat dogmatic undertaking: it’s the precise, step-by-step process of making coffee in the morning, or the way we cycle through a particular workout regimen.

There’s often something quite pleasant about performing a ritual, in that it’s familiar, unchanging, and leads to a known, consistent outcome.

In a world that is of...

Specification Gaming

Within the world of software development, the term “specification gaming” refers to a behavior that literally fulfills the requirements of a task without achieving the underlying intended purpose.

In practice, this might mean that a piece of software is told to figure out how to get the high-score in a video game, and decides to utilize a flaw in the game’s code to put its name at the top of the high-score list, rather the figuring out how to get better at the game.

This is a real example,...