How we see art is a reflection of ourselves. We can only feel things that are, in some way, part of ourselves. Much of art resonates not merely due to it’s beauty, but its ability to show us … us.

Sometimes that can be scary. Just out of personal interest — not for trolling — I am a member of several conservative meme/lifestyle groups. Occasionally an art piece pops up that deeply disturbs most members of the group (McJesus, for a recent example). The common, but not overwhelming, response is scorn. “That is horrible and blasphemous.” “Please take it down.” “They will regret [making that].” Very little is said why the piece is “horrible;” it is simply repeated that it is.

Jani Leinonen, creator of McJesus. Pirje Mykkänen, valokuvaaja / photographer • CC BY-SA 4.0

It’s not easy allowing ourselves such mental vulnerability. It feels like an attack – like they’re saying we’re bad. Like whoever made that art hates us. If I were a Christian, it would probably feel deeply unsettling to see Ronald McDonald nailed to a cross. To take something I took for granted and make it into what superficially feels like a mockery of who I am. For most people thought ends there. The mind shuts off and the shouting begins.

People suck at self-reflection. Especially when instigated by a faceless “other.” Part of this is growing a thicker skin. Did I really just want to yell at a sculpture? That’s ridiculous. Does some art make you feel silly? Alone and insignificant? Good. It’s doing its job. What is the art trying to say?

And what does it say about you that a piece makes you feel what it does?

Image stolen from the Art Corps twitter feed.

Maladies in the War of Art

I recently read The War of Art, a self-help book on overcoming the internal forces preventing us from doing our life’s work. It got a lot of things right. Foremost: for most people, our greatest enemy is ourselves.

It got one thing wrong: it says that many maladies are imagined and exist purely in our heads, and do not really exist. The specific examples it uses – Seasonal Affective Disorder and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder – are real phenomena that impact people’s ability to be productive. Marginalizing those disorders isn’t useful; it does not make those things less real. Pretending they aren’t real is futile. Instead, the below is how I approach those – and similar – psychological problems. It also applies to physical problems.

The only possible universes in which you produce the art you want to make are the ones where you have every malady in your path and you produce your art. It’s not fair that you’re going through whatever you’re experiencing. Some people have it better than you. Some people don’t feel a weight on their chest every morning keeping them from even rising to take a shower in the morning. That sucks. The possibilities where you produce art and you don’t have your issues aren’t worth considering – they aren’t real and can never be.

In the words of a dear friend:

“Make art anyway.”

On Enabling Negative Characterizations

We’ve done a terrible job debating gun control. We’ve allowed gun-control opponents to steal the show because we haven’t done the basic legwork to even know what we’re saying.

• “I can’t imagine why anyone would need a semi-auto for self defense.”

• “ARs should be banned.”

• “The shooter used a high power rifle.”

If you’ve said one of these, you’ve expressed an opinion you (probably) haven’t researched. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of guns will spot this immediately. This discredits anything further you have to say on the topic – even if it is compelling statistics backed by studies. Alternatively, they’ll take you at your word and you’ll find yourself defending a ridiculous or untenable position.

If you’re going to debate gun control, respect your conversational partners enough to know what you’re saying. Imagine how you’d feel if a marriage equality opponent mixed up the terms “trans” and “gay” or constantly assumed all gay men are effeminate. In the realm of gun control, you are on their turf and must use their terminology to be taken seriously. Words have meaning and we can’t expect to have meaningful, serious discussions without agreeing on definitions.

Language shapes how we perceive the things it describes, and knowledge of less-known parts of it can become part of your identity. Failing to learn the basics before spouting an opinion says that you don’t take the other side seriously enough to even learn to speak with them and understand what they’re saying. It voids any possibility of common ground and makes you susceptible to making a public fool of yourself. It kills your ability to show empathy – one of the strongest tools for building compromise.

Gun control is a complex topic. Have the personal responsibility to learn about it before speaking. If there’s a requirement for constructive discourse, it’s being able to communicate. If someone uses a term you don’t know – ask – showing humility is a great way to build rapport with an opponent. I’ve included a list below of several terms you should know to be an informed citizen.

Commonly Misused Terms

Don’t use these unless you mean them. If you don’t care enough about the topic to learn these and use them properly, stay out of gun control debates – you’ll do far more harm to your side than good.

AR – ArmaLite Rifle, a series of rifles produced by ArmaLite, a small arms engineering company.

High Power Rifle – a type of scored shooting sport.

Semi-automatic – a mode of fire that chambers a new round with each pull of the trigger, but only fires one round per trigger pull.

Automatic – a mode of fire that chambers and fires rounds continuously as long as the trigger is held down. (Also: full-auto, fully-automatic)

Burst mode – a mode of fire like automatic, but stops after a predetermined number of rounds. Usually 2-5, depending on the firearm.

Selective-fire – a firearm which allows switching between two or more modes of fire (such as the above).

Assault rifle – a selective-fire rifle with a detachable magazine. Not necessarily automatic. Uses an intermediate cartridge.

Manual operation – firearms that require an additional action from the user to chamber a new round (not just pulling the trigger).

There are many more you should know, but these are the ones I see misused by gun control advocates most often.

This is a speech I prepared as my Icebreaker speech for Toastmasters. Toastmasters is an organization that promotes public speaking skills, and the famous “Icebreaker” is the first speech a new member gives to introduce themselves to their club-mates. This is mine (with edits suggested from the feedback I received from other members and friends).

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Hi, I’m Will Beason and I’m going to change how you think.

While preparing this speech I put a lot of thought into how it differs from introducing myself to someone or writing an “about me” article. I don’t normally introduce myself in speeches, so it was important for me to think about how the medium is different than the modes I’m comfortable communicating in. I can’t simply take what I would say in a conversation or bio and put that into a speech: I’d run into the same problems people have when adapting books to films – they are different media with different strengths and different weaknesses. I want to give you an impression of the care and thought I put into creating things, and why I decided to focus on public speaking now. Along the way, I want to help you understand what drives me.

When using a speech to introduce myself I can’t tailor my responses to an individual. I have to generalize and can’t personalize it as I can in a conversation. So, how do I highlight core components of myself in a speech rather than simply turning my side of an introductory conversation into a speech? In my case, metatext. Metatext is writing that references how writing is put together. In this case, I’ve written a speech that references its own structure and themes as an effort to highlight how carefully I construct things and think about how they go together.

One natural structure I could have followed is listing facts about myself – I attended West Point; I have worked for Google; my professional specializations are data analysis and natural language processing for building artificial intelligence. But these are just rote facts that could overshadow my point. Being able to regurgitate a list of statements about me isn’t really “knowing” me; to know me is to understand the common themes that I’ve used to structure my life and make decisions.

That suggests covering why I decided to focus on public speaking now. What can my answer to that question tell an audience about me? I believe I can have a positive impact on the world by sharing my ideas.

We are responsible for the effects of systems we’re a part of. What’s real – the truth – matters and is something we can discover. We have to be aware of the effects of using data to influence people’s lives. We’re going to have to figure out how to live, to learn, to build with the seven billion other people on the planet.

Being able to speak clearly and impactfully about these ideas gives me another avenue to communicate with others. Writing and one-on-one conversation can only take me so far; I have to be able to reach wider groups in order to be effective. I recognized this years ago, but until recently I lacked the self confidence in myself and my ideas.

I attribute much of this change to my move to San Francisco. Here, for the first time, I connected with the local gay community. I found people with similar life experiences and interests. I felt a connection to a place; that there was a network of people willing to support and guide me as I grow into my own.

I’m taking the time to learn about the influence I can have on the people around me. I want to become a better mentor. How do I introduce people to concepts they wouldn’t otherwise come across, and share the joy of figuring out how to change things for the better on a grand scale? I want people to not only understand and appreciate the thought I put into what I create, but inspire them to do the same in their own work. These aren’t easy tasks, but they’re deeply important to me.

For now it’s the struggle to find what’s next. I’ve finally learned that it’s the people I work with, so much more than the project I’m working on, who will help me grow and find actualization. I’ve worked on five different machine learning projects, each with its own immense potential benefit for the world, but without the right team for me. They’re good projects with smart people working on them, but I’ve realized that just being able to solve any problem isn’t the only requirement for greatness. It also takes a professional drive to make sure the right problem is being solved. A sense of responsibility to make sure we aren’t creating a system that will actively harm society – a path most often entered blindly.

It isn’t easy finding people of that caliber. I can’t force people to really accept that these things are important and make it a part of themselves. The best I can do is be an example that inspires people to follow my path. To quote one of my favorite books, The Clean Coder, “You can’t convince people to be craftsmen. Arguments are ineffective. Data is inconsequential. Case studies mean nothing. [It] is not so much a rational decision as an emotional one. This is a very human thing.”

It’s that human element that I’ve had the biggest struggle with. That we all struggle with. If you have the craftsman mindset, as Robert C. Martin calls it, then you know how it has changed how you see the world. If you don’t, all I can do is speak of a world beyond what you can see and show you what it looks like to live in it. One that glimmers for you in moments of introspection. But you alone can decide for yourself whether you will take the next step.

Thank you.

Salary negotiations are hard. It’s an information asymmetric game where the job candidate is trying to maximize their salary, and the recruiter is trying to hire them for the lowest price possible.

Both have remarkable incentive to misrepresent themselves. The recruiter’s strategy is to lowball the candidate – trying to get them to revise their self-worth downward. The candidate’s strategy is to highball – anchoring their perceived value to this higher value.

This is poisonous for a variety of reasons. The candidate may take a salary that’s less than they’re happy with, which is one of the most common reasons for attrition. It puts employers in the position of taking advantage of someone even before they’re hired. Most importantly, the game pits the prospective new hire against the very company that wants their loyalty!

We can use the revelation principle to turn this into a collaborative game where the optimal strategy for both the prospective candidate and the employer is to honestly say what they think. In fact, the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to the team that proved that any game where parties have private information can be turned into a game where the best strategy is to be perfectly honest.

But, what do we need to do to get this?

Let’s start with the Vickrey auction as inspiration. Standard auctions generally operate in one of three ways, (1) increase bids until we are left with a price only one person is willing to pay, (2) decrease price from a starting amount until someone is willing to pay, or (3) bidders secretly submit bids and the highest bid wins and is paid. Both of these encourage elaborate strategies that lead to suboptimal bidding. The Vickrey auction is just a slight variation on (3), where the highest bidder pays the second highest bid. See the Wikipedia page (linked above) for a sketch of the proof showing why it rewards honesty.

But that’s bidding. What about salary negotiations? All you need is two pens and two pieces of paper.

Write down how much you think you’re worth on a piece of paper. Have your prospective employer write down how much you’re worth to them. If they write down that you’re worth as much as or more than you think you are, go with your number. Otherwise, thank them for their time and go elsewhere.

Strategies

Terms

Truthful – making an offer you think reflects your actual value
Untruthful – making an offer you think does not reflect your actual value
Underbidding – offering less than the candidate’s amount
Bidding – offering exactly the candidate’s amount
Overbidding – offering more than the candidate’s amount

Employer Strategies

The dominant strategy is for both you and the prospective employer to be honest. Sure, you may miss out on money but you’re already at an amount you’ve agreed you are happy with.

• The employer is equally incentivized for truthful bidding and truthful overbidding. Their bid doesn’t change how much they pay you, so the strategies have equal value.
• The employer is incentivized to truthfully underbid. If to them you’re not worth as much as you think you are, they should not hire you.
• The employer is discouraged from untruthful overbidding – they end up paying you more than they think you’re worth.
• The employer is discouraged from untruthful underbidding – they miss out on getting you at all.

Candidate Strategies

Underrequesting – untruthfully requesting less than you’re worth
Overrequesting – untruthfully requesting more than you think you’re worth

For candidates, as with employers, the dominant strategy is to provide a value that is an honest assessment of your worth.

• You are discouraged from underrequesting. Of course you want to be paid what you’re worth! Being paid less than you think you’re worth greatly increases the chance you’ll soon be looking for a job soon – for a higher amount.
• You are encouraged to overrequest only if you think the employer vastly overestimates your self-perceived worth. If you think you’re worth $80,000 and overbid $100,000, you must believe that, given that the employer will offer at least $80,000, they are over 80% likely to offer $100,000 or more. In most cases this is unlikely.
• You are discouraged from overrequesting otherwise as it unnecessarily increases your risk of not being hired by an employer who values you at least as much as you’re worth.

To counter to candidate overbidding, of course, the employer must get an accurate representation of your skills. Or, at least, convince you that they have.

Final Thoughts

The outcomes and strategies of this game probably change considering that (1) you probably interview for multiple positions and (2) companies usually interview multiple candidates for a single position. I’ll have to think about what the implications are, as they could change.

Tim Ferris sent hundreds of successful people a list of the same 11 interview questions and collated the results of the 140 responses into a book, Tribe of Mentors. This is exactly the type of data a cybernetic approach is for. The interesting things here are less what any individual interviewee said, but patterns in what they said collectively. What were their roadblocks? What was important to them? How did they disagree with each other?

One of my favorite quotes directly attacks the premise of the book: “[Advice] is almost always driven by anecdotal experience, and thus has limited value and relevance .… Ignore advice, especially early in one’s career. There is no universal path to success.” (John Arnold, page 374) It should say something that when retraversing the book to find this quote I stumbled on five similar ones. I agree with the sentiment, but John Arnold misses a broader point, succinctly said by Matsuo Basho as “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.” It is not that there is nothing to be learned by listening to advice, it is that advice is not transferable without understanding context or principles. The reasoning behind a conclusion is more useful than the conclusion, and patterns of reasoning across many mentors is even more so. From a single person’s reasoning you can follow their logic and determine how believable their conclusion is for yourself. From the reasoning of many people you have the opportunity to develop principles that you can apply to other contexts. So sure, there is no universal path or even a universal map. But in seeing how many others read the maps of their lives, maybe you can learn to read your own.

Conflicting advice is the best source of this sort of direction. Fortunately, Tribe of Mentors is full of conflicting advice. Tim did an excellent job positioning similar people with strong disagreements – at times I had the thought “didn’t they just say the opposite thing?”, but when I turned back a few pages I saw it was from a different interviewee. The myriad dissonant voices blur together into beautiful higher-order concepts.

For example, here’s a smattering of work life advice from the book:

• “You should set up your life so that it is as comfortable and happy as possible.” (Susan Cain, 13)
• “Ignore anyone who tells you to go for security over experience.” (Patton Oswalt, 106)
• “Advice they should ignore: … Avoid risk. Play it safe.” (Josh Waitzkin, 197)
• “I do not believe in work-life balance.” (Debbie Millman, 29)
• “Burnout is not the price you pay for success.” (Arianna Huffington, 214)
• “Growth and gains from from periods of rest.” (Amelia Boone, 130)

For this I’ll take the position that “The face is that when two extreme opinions meet, the truth lies generally somewhere in the middle.” (Annie Duke, 172) I’d go a step further and claim that not only does the truth of this lie somewhere in the middle, but everyone has to figure out where they fall on the spectrum themselves. Sure, I could be deluding myself that a sense of security is required for my creative work just as someone else might incorrectly think they perform best in adversity. Who are we to question someone else’s self-experience? The best we can do is show them that there are other paths and give them the tools for assessing the one they’re on.

Daily meditation was a common theme in Tribe of Mentors. Is it a fad, or is there something to it?

Meditation may be overhyped, but there’s probably something to it. If meditation makes you feel better, do it. Meditation seems to make me feel better, but my anecdote should not be a compelling reason to you (neither should the similar anecdotes of 80% of Tim’s interviewees). Science-Based Medicine has an excellent article on the current scientific understanding of mindfulness meditation and what would need to be done to be certain of its impact. Here’s a meta-analysis of 47 studies suggesting there is a small causal relationship between meditation and reducing anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. This doesn’t mean that meditating will make you as successful as the interviewees in Tribe of Mentors. At best the data from Tribe of Mentors suggest a relationship between (likelihood of being in Tim’s book) and (likelihood of the regular meditation). It could easily be that successful people who meditate are statistically more susceptible to Tim’s charm.

In the past year (for fun) I’ve written nearly a hundred thousand words for myself, and another ten thousand in personal correspondence. I think it’s time I started writing publicly again.

It’s been about a month and things are … better. Brand new place, spent a few weeks out of town, changing my wardrobe, typical post-breakup stuff. Not having my own place – or cooking equipment to call my own – really put a damper on my ability to cook the past month. One new lease and Amazon shopping list later, that’s now taken care of. I found that my favorite food blog, Serious Eats, has an article just for my situation.

It feels nice to cook everything for myself for the first day in a long while.

Breakfast

It became a ritual for me in college. Fry bacon in a skillet, then fry a couple eggs in the bacon fat once it’s done. Flip over the eggs in the skillet, then immediately serve. When there are about five minutes left on that, butter up some bread and toast it in the oven at 400F for 5 minutes. Unlike college, I’ve now got a cast iron skillet to do this in. The main difference is that the eggs cook very quickly since cast iron holds heat well. I’ll have to get used to the new oven and adjust to it as well. It’s not great, but it’ll do what I need if I figure out the timing.

Lunch

French onion soup. I know what you’re thinking: two hours?! Nope, that’s what’s great about having a pressure cooker – it cuts the time to 40 minutes. As far as time goes, it also helps I made it a couple days ago to share with a friend. Before then I’d only ever eaten it at La Madeline. Cooking it – and today reheating it – filled my entire apartment with the smell of caramelized onions. I can’t complain. It is incredibly filling, and there’s no way I’ll be able to finish the leftovers before they go bad in about a day from now. When I make it again I’ll make sure to have enough friends nearby to consume it.

Snack

One from Alton Brown’s Everyday Cook. Specifically, the savory Greek yogurt dip. Been munching on it throughout the afternoon with some carrots and celery. I’ll have to try it with potato chips next time – really want to see how it goes with starchy saltiness.

Dinner

This was the first meal I cooked once I had the barest essentials in my apartment. Surprisingly I hadn’t ever made it for myself, but I’m going to make it regularly from now on. Steak, mashed potatoes, and sauteed mushrooms. It’s about as American as a meal can get.

Life sucks. I’m going to use cooking to make it better.

Long story short, I’m living out of a coworker’s house for the week. I’ve just experienced the worst two weeks of my life. They’re finally over, and I need to heal. Cooking is going to be part of that.

For my birthday, I bought myself a copy of Alton Brown’s new cookbook, Everyday Cook. Over the weekend I sat down in coffee shops and planned stuff to make this week. Most importantly: Bad Day Bitter Martini.

The hardest part of the Bad Day Bitter Martini was crushing the ice. After folding the ice in a clean towel as directed, I smashed the ice between two cutting boards.

Obviously, I made the strong version so I didn’t need no fancy Boston-style cocktail shaker. I’m not really a fan of bitter alcoholic drinks. I’m a sweet and fruity kinda guy. Basically, if it’s bright pink and basically candy, I’m in. I was pleasantly surprised that this simple drink was quite delicious. Normally bitter drinks make the back of my throat involuntarily contract as if it’s afraid to let anything else down. This … didn’t. I can tell the aroma of the grapefruit peel played a big role in this, but what’s doubly odd is that I really don’t like grapefruit. Somehow the bitter-sweet of the Amaro and the bitter-sour of the grapefruit balanced to make something palatable to me.

Unfortunately, my host’s wife has gone to bed, so it’s too late for me to make another (crushing ice is loud).