Someone explaining to you why your idea wouldn’t work is vastly different than them explaining why it didn’t work.

The former is skepticism. It might be correct, but it’s theory. Even if it turns out to be true, running the experiment can still be worthwhile, to iterate towards success.

Giving you the benefit of prior experience, on the other hand, is a valuable gift. If someone tells you that they also tried the same idea and it failed, and why it failed, then you should listen. You’re basically getting the benefit of (at least) one experiment already run! You’re a step closer to success just by listening.

Importantly, the second person is also a more trustworthy source, simply because they actually tried the idea. That alone puts them on a different intellectual level than someone who simply decided from the armchair why they wouldn’t give it a shot.

Experiement, always!

All of the following things are true:

1. If your caloric intake is higher than your caloric expenditure, you will gain weight. If your caloric intake is less, you will lose weight. This simple formula, “Calories In < Calories Out = Weight Loss” is entirely and universally true.
2. Your body responds to a variety of conditions by adjusting its caloric expenditures. There are various things that make your body adjust its caloric expenditures downward as a survival mechanism. If your body thinks it’s starving, it’s an evolutionary advantage to adjust its energy expenditures downward.
3. The above means that sometimes you can start dieting but then stop losing weight, or even gaining weight.
4. That statement does not mean that the first statement was incorrect!

Here’s why I bring this up: This particular argument has really obnoxious people on both sides. Smug gym bros like to say “Calories in, calories out” as a slogan, telling anyone who hasn’t lost weight that they’re simply eating too much. And then equally obnoxious fat positivity crusaders say things like “The body doesn’t do math!”

I happened to overhear someone arguing against the “calories in/calories out” position by citing the various ways the body will respond to diets or lowered caloric intake with things like metabolic adaptation (i.e. using less of the body’s resources in response to a perceived scarcity in the environment). And like… yeah, the body does that. But that just means you have to consider both halves of the calorie equation!

In other words: it really, really is always “calories in/calories out,” and that’s sometimes hard to do because the body will respond with lower “calories in” by lowering “calories out,” and that’s really a contest between your own willpower and every evolutionary signal your body sends. So it’s simple, but not easy.

That’s the nuance. But I’ve never heard either side of this argument acknowledge the other. (For the record, I have zero dog in this fight. Unless you’re me or my children, I don’t care how much you weigh, and I never will.) But that’s because both sides are using this as a culture war fought with slogans, not a nuanced search for understanding.

And that’s the real lesson today. Virtually every argument you hear isn’t about the thing. It’s about the culture of the two sides. It’s points for your tribe. Don’t get lost in it.

My oldest daughter is 14. This evening, after all of the kids were supposed to be in bed, I had just started working on a household chore that was relatively involved. All the tools were out, the panel was off, I was on the floor… and that eldest daughter, who should have been asleep, asked me if I wanted to snuggle.

If they lay me to my final rest tomorrow, let it be known that I snuggled. Chores can always wait, but they grow up too fast to miss those moments when they come.

Once a year, the dead should all get to come back to visit. They can’t bring any knowledge of any afterlife with them, but their pain and injuries are gone. Once a year, they just get to come back and gab. You can catch them up on all the things that have been happening with the family. You can play them new music or watch a new movie. You can introduce them to their new grandchild. You can just smoke a cigar with them.

I miss my dad.

It’s fascinating how much of our sense of self is tied up in where (and when) we exist. Move even a few towns over, and it’s not just your environment that changes – you do.

If you, with your exact same genetic code, had been born 500 years in the past, you’d be a completely different person now. You couldn’t just map your experiences one-to-one onto that distant time; if you’re a florist now, you can’t assume you’d be a different variety of florist then. A million things happened in your life to get you to that spot, and those things wouldn’t have happened if you’d lived 500 years in the past. Or even 50 years in the past, or 50 miles up the road.

When someone new comes to your town, they’re a changeling. They’re experiencing a new world, not just new street names. You’re a part of that new experience, one piece of the new identity forming around them. So be kind!

Lacking a plan can turn a five-minute task into a thirty-minute one. And making a plan takes all of 2 minutes. You don’t even need to do it far in advance!

I’m not sure if this is a weird quirk of my particular brain or just a side-effect of coming of age around the time the Matrix was released, but I’ve always found it easy to see the underlying “ones and zeros” beneath a coat of paint.

Wait, let me go back and start a little differently.

I play a lot of board games. If you ask someone what a particular board game is about, you often get one of two very different kinds of answers. The more common answer is something like “Oh, this is a game about fighting dragons, and you’re trying to save the kingdom from all these evil dragons, but sometimes there are good ones, and you get a bunch of cool magic swords and stuff, and the winner is whoever bags the biggest dragon!” That’s perfectly true, but the less common (and equally true) kind of answer is something like: “This is an auction game; you have various different kinds of resources and you bid on things you want, and the winner is whoever bid most effectively.”

The first answer is the window dressing. The coat of paint. It’s describing the theme of the game. The second answer is describing the underlying mechanics. You bid currency for a resource you want. The “currency” could be “cool swords” or “your knight’s health,” and the thing you want to “buy” is “a dead dragon.” But if you stripped away all the stuff about swords and dragons, you could still play the game, in the same way you can play chess without caring about what ancient warrior class each piece was meant to represent.

Now, for a lot of people, the game is very boring without all the window dressing. I’m not one of those people. I like swords and dragons! But I don’t care if my sudoku puzzle is like, sushi-themed or whatever. I’m just there for the math. And I can see right through everything else to the math pretty easily.

Okay, tangent time. I think a lot of what it takes to understand math, philosophy, science, and psychology is the ability to see two situations as equivalent even when their window dressing is very, very different.

The full trolley problem isn’t just “do you hit one person or five.” It’s asking if you’re willing to pull the lever to switch the train to only kill one person, and then asking if you’d push someone in front of the train to stop it from killing the five original people, and then asking if you’d murder a homeless man and harvest his organs to save five dying hospital patients, and then asking people what the actual difference between those three scenarios is.

And that’s the point: there isn’t any. If you strip away the window dressing and get down to the math, all three scenarios are asking the same question: “Is it okay to actively make the choice to murder one person to save five lives that would end if you make the passive choice to do nothing?” Every scrap of your moral intuition will try to scream at you that the scenarios aren’t different, but if you can look past the paint and see the ones and zeroes, that’s what’s at stake.

I started thinking about this today because of the Monty Hall problem. Here’s a quick summary: You’re on a game show, trying to win a new car, which is randomly behind one of three doors. You pick a door, let’s say Door #3. Before opening the door, the host opens up one of the other doors, say Door #1, and shows you that the car is not behind that one. He then asks if you want to stick with Door #3, or switch to Door #2. Should you switch?

The intuitive answer is “no, it doesn’t matter,” but that’s actually incorrect. The correct answer is that you should switch: you have a 1 in 3 chance of being right the first time, but you have a 2 in 3 chance of being right if you switch.

That’s not the debate – that’s settled and proven. What trips people up is that even if they believe the answer (and of course, a huge number of people don’t believe it) is that they can’t find an easy, intuitive way of explaining or understanding why. They can look at the mathematical proof, but they can’t just grok it.

I have (what feels to me like) an intuitive explanation, so let me see if it works on you:

You pick Door #3, correctly understanding that you have a 1 in 3 chance of being correct and getting the car. Before opening Door #3, the host asks if you want to switch to Doors #1 & #2 together. If you switch, and the car is behind either door, you get the car. Assuming that the host isn’t deliberately trying to trick you or anything and this is just always how the game show goes, do you get that switching would give you a 2 in 3 chance of getting the car? You do, right? Because obviously 2 doors is 2/3 of the doors, and so if you could bet on the car being behind either of them, that’s a better deal.

Well, “Opening Door #1 and showing you it has nothing, then offering you to swap to Door #2” is exactly the same as “Offering to let you swap to Doors #1 & #2 together.”

If you get offered the chance to swap to Doors 1 & 2, and you take it, you already know that at least one of those doors has to be empty. There’s only one car. So dramatically opening one of the doors to show you is just window dressing for suspense, it doesn’t change anything.

Here’s another way the host could make the exact same offer, but phrase it differently: “Okay, you picked Door #3. Before we open it, I’ll give you a chance to pick a different door. But I’ll sweeten the deal: if you choose to swap and you pick an empty door, I’ll let you mulligan and pick again!” Again, you end up with the same information before making the final choice, but surely you see how getting an extra pick increases your odds from 1 in 3 to 2 in 3, right? You get two picks!

Anyway, I genuinely don’t know if that made it clearer for you. One of the problems with intuitively seeing an answer like that is that you can have a hard time explaining it to someone who doesn’t see things the same way. So really, that’s what this is for me – practice. If you understand the Monty Hall problem any better, let me know!

What does it take to get you to trust someone? Sure, standard answers are fine – “trust them a little at first, wait for them to prove themselves, trust more or less based on that,” etc. But what if you’re in a situation where that won’t happen? What makes someone feel trustworthy to you if you don’t have the benefit of gradual evaluation?

Without knowing it, you are carrying around burdens. You are burdened by things that won’t work, things that could be better, things that won’t help you. You don’t even know you have this weight, because you haven’t failed in the right way yet.

Every failure is a chance to shed some of those burdens. Discard the bad ideas now that you’ve tested them and found them wanting. Get rid of the chains holding you back, once you realize them for what they are.

Failure is a chrysalis you emerge from, beautiful and triumphant and unburdened.

One of the benefits of choosing to spend a lot of time with your extended family or your local community is that those groups will naturally have some people you get along with better than others. That’s a good thing. Being able to find common ground or polite interaction with diverse people is an incredible strength.

I love intentional communities – if you find the online fan club for your favorite book, definitely talk to them! Make friends! It’s great to do that… just not exclusively.

You need to be around people with a little more friction than that. You need to sand off your own roughest edges and find ways to interact and build together.

So go to the family reunion or the neighborhood barbecue. Not as a chore – as an adventure!