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!

Getting people not to do stuff is tricky. Trickier than getting them to do stuff, I think.

Partially you have the “pink elephant” problem – if I tell you “don’t think about a pink elephant,” what’s the first thing you think of? Heck, it’s the only thing. Your brain fixates on sentence subjects, not silly modifiers like “don’t.” So if I tell you not to touch the cookie jar, you become fixated on touching the cookie jar pretty quickly.

The second problem is that in simply telling people not to do something, you alert at least some number of people that The Thing was an option in the first place. A sign reading “Please Don’t Take the Unguarded Gold Coins from Behind the Counter” alerts people about the existence of unguarded bullion that didn’t already know about it.

But in any case, it’s harder to dissuade than persuade.

Tonight was opening night for my eldest daughter’s latest play. This is a major event for her, for multiple reasons. First, this is the last “kids'” show she’ll ever be in; she ages out of the youth theater program after this. But more importantly, as a fine capstone to her youth theater experience, she got the role she auditioned for: the main villain!

That’s right, my daughter is playing the evil Queen Aggravain in Once Upon a Mattress, a cheeky retelling of the Princess & The Pea story. It was a really fun play, and my daughter killed it. She was born to play villains!

She’s worked so hard pursuing something she loves so dearly – what else is there in life? To work hard at something you love, and to enjoy the fruits of that labor; this is the greatest life imaginable. She’s perfect, I love her, and she makes me proud every day.

Brava, Beanstalk!

While I think efficiency is generally a good thing, any trait taken too far becomes a negative. There’s a particular version of this that I’ve noticed I keep doing to myself, and I want to work on stopping.

Here’s what I do: I notice during the week that I feel a little stressed and want some relaxation time. Because my schedule is somewhat full given work, kids, etc., I will wake up earlier than I have to in order to squeeze in some extra relaxation time before I have to do whatever I need to do.

So now I’m stressed and tired.

And when I wake up, I either take longer to get moving because I’m both tired and lacking in urgency (since whatever I need to do is farther away), or I do manage to do something fun, but then get wrapped up in it and end up being more stressed because I scramble to get to my responsibilities!

So I’m going to try, next week, to do something similar to “observing the Sabbath.” I’m going to pick a day next week and clear it – no responsibilities, no planned activities, etc. Just a chill day. I will guard that schedule with my life, and I’ll let the rest of the week be what it is. I won’t try to force relaxation in (I’ll still take breaks and all, I’m not crazy, just not big “relaxation activities”). I’ll use the knowledge of the coming Day of Rest to shelve my stress.

We’ll see if it works!

My middle child has about the most expansive mental library of animal facts you’ll ever encounter. She loves animals and she loves facts, so it’s a natural state of affairs. Today, I took her and some of her siblings and cousins to the zoo, which she was delighted about.

On the drive there, she made an off-hand comment that it would be hard for her to learn anything new, since she already knew “every fact about animals.” While I could have corrected her hubris, I elected not to – that wasn’t the lesson I wanted to come out of this very teachable moment. I didn’t want to belittle her expansive knowledge base; it is, after all, quite impressive! Instead, I just wanted to challenge the notion that you could ever know everything. And I wanted it to be fun.

So I gave her a challenge: If she could find 5 animal facts in the zoo that she didn’t already know, she’d earn a prize. What a delightful scavenger hunt it was! She definitely found five and earned her prize, and I was happy with the lesson: it’s not always about how much you already know. It’s about how much you can still learn, every day.

It’s interesting the way social conditioning will keep us from pointing out – or in some cases, even noticing – the absurd. We’re social creatures, wired for that kind of interaction. We find “getting along” to be more important than most ridiculous things we might see. Pointing out the absurd might lead to conflict, and most of us are naturally conflict-avoidant.

But the scoundrels in our midst will use that to social engineer us to our absurd graves. So every once in a while, point it out just to keep them guessing.

As I type these words, a set of astronauts are the farthest away from Earth that humans have ever been. They’re looking at the moon’s far side, and I wept when I listened to them name a newly-discovered feature after one of the astronaut’s late wife.

The sacrifices that humans are capable of making in order to go one step further in our understanding, our exploration, our drive to satiate our curiosity – it’s insane. Purely irrational. Spectacular.

May we never lose that spark. May the most insane among us reach ever-greater heights, always. May we climb the highest mountain, always, simply because it’s there.