Brady Helps

I sat across the table from my dad and asked, “what are you thinking about, Dad?”

Dad: “Nothing,” 

Me: "I wish I could think of nothing as easily as you.”

Dad: “You just try too hard.  When you try to hard at a thing, it’s hard to sit back and enjoy it.  If you can sit back and enjoy a thing, you can think nothing of it.”

After he said that, I imagined you might find the idea insightful.

The old man has got some insights left to share before the eternal peace invites him to the eternal party.

I’m watching my Dad lose his memories. And at first, I thought, “what are we without our memories?”

The more I spend time with him the more I realize that there is more to a person that their memories. While the person that is my dad is no longer how I remember “my dad”, that person does still perceive the world. How might I help him perceive the world in a way that brings him a smile?

Alzheimer’s sucks. It’s a shitty disease and I hope you never have to deal with it. That said, life shows us a silver lining… the constraint that is memory. The creative embraces the constraint and says “i can make that work.”

Lots of things, and each person experiences and manages differently.Don’t be so quick to rush to judgment of how others handle traumatic events.Come back to sonder.

Dr. Oliver Sacks, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, writes that scientists believed human mental processes included computation and abstraction. That’s it. Dr. Sacks, in examining a patient he refers to as Dr. P, identified that another mental process factor is judgment. If Dr. P. took his shoes off, he would think his bare feet are shoes. You can imagine Mrs. P.’s surprise when her husband tried to pull her head off her body so that he could “put his hat on.” His perception of the world via his senses is not operating correctly — he has agnosia. Dr. Sacks noticed that Dr. P. would hum to himself. Dr. P. could easily dress himself and carry on living provided he kept the music going in his head. It’s almost as if he perceived the world through music and sound. He could do the things he needed to do, he teach music, he could recognize his music students (if they moved around and he could hear them), but he couldn’t make the right judgments. Dr. Sacks writes that for too long doctors and scientists did not consider judgment a part of human mental processes. He writes: “Our cognitive sciences are themselves suffering from an agnosia essentially similar to Dr. P.’s. Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable — of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computation.”I say, of what happens to our work with people when we lose sight or discount judgment, uniqueness, personal, and sonder to favor process and numbers? I argue our work fails.

I don’t know physics… but I am aware that I can’t make more energy for myself out of nothing. All I can do is rest and recharge. I expend a lot of energy during the time. I enjoy my work as a leader, I enjoy the problems I solve, and I exert energy reading, thinking, and writing for you. I play music — and that requires energy. I’m out of energy now… I’m tired and the brain is drained of capacity for this week. Resting now with the hope that tomorrow I wake up refreshed. Ready to think, work on, and tackle something exciting and fun. Good night.

Dan, a product manager at Facebook, writes a daily blog like me. The other day, Dan wrote a piece about dogs and their sense of smell. Excerpt: We have about 6 million olfactory receptors, whereas a dog has over 300 million. I thought this would imply that their sense of smell would only be 50x better, but when I asked Claude AI it told me, “The number of olfactory receptors alone doesn’t directly translate to the overall sensitivity of smell. It’s an oversimplification to assume a linear relationship between receptor count and smell acuity.” - Dan’s DailyWhen one can sense so much more in the world than we ever could, how does that world appear to them? I play music, and for better or for worse, I know I perceive sound differently than some other non-musicians. I can hear some frequencies and how they work together because I’m trained for that. My sense of the world sounds different than another person’s.How does the world look beyond the margin of our perception? I’m left with this thought: I’ll never know; and therefore, I cannot discount the way someone else who can see more sees things.

There are bad drones — people who drone on and on about an idea. There are good drones — banjos, and bagpipes are too examples. I never understood the attraction to bagpipe music. I admire how the performers of the instrument circular breathe. Musically, I love how a drone adds both tension and release to a piece. As you listen to the piece below, you’ll notice how the drone notes change the vibe — from pensive and mysterious to joyous. Perhaps the pensive is the doubt and despair, and the joyous sound is the celebration of banishment. Either way… I hope you find the music as stimulating as I did.

I thought about ideas today. I struggled with a problem and thought to myself: “this would be a lot easier if I wrote out a problem statement.” That’s where I learned.The artist’s struggle is the battle to take what’s abstract and give it a form. Often times the idea, the phrase, the hypothesis, or the white whale you intend to slay is a figment of your imagination — it’s not real to you until you make it real. Once a thing has a form, it’s much easier to work it into something beautiful.

Economists Writing Every Day wrote a post about Persistent Beliefs that caught my attention.Essentially, for beliefs to persist they must:Be transferred from generation to generation;Persist within the person as well as their culture group; and,Be productive.I’m reflecting now… I’ve done so many things in my life, good and bad. I’ve seen so many things. Heard so many things. Tasted so many things… believed so many things. I don’t know that I have many beliefs that truly persist for me. I am not influenced by the beliefs of my family. I realize that sounds harsh and, possibly sad. However, it’s not sad for me. I don’t have kids, and there’s no need for me to adopt or persist with a belief for the purposes of passing it on. I am not influenced by the beliefs of the religion I grew up with. I’ve seen there are many other gods, and many other ways to connect one’s self with something higher. I seem to be most influenced by things I read, or how I perceive the moment I’m in. Given new inputs, I make Bayesian updates to my worldview and move on. If I have any persistent belief… it is a belief in some type of universal human truth. That we all have a desire for someone to believe in us, and we all desire to matter to someone(s) or something(s). That truth persists through time and transcends culture.

I enjoy using AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT. Yes, it’s easy to ask for an answer — but those answers may be wrong. Instead, I use these tools to teach me new skills. For example, I asked ChatGPT to teach me the fundamentals of game theory via prompt — see my prompt below.PROMPT: Teach me game theory and assume I know nothing about it. I do best when I learn the simplest concepts first and then build upon that. Teach me one concept, test my understanding in a way that proves I know the concept and how to use it, and then proceed to the next higher level prompt. You are most helpful if you start simple, test and verify, and then proceed to the next concept. Keep going until I fail 3x in a row.ChatGPT’s Output:In game theory, a "game" is a situation where two or more players (which could be individuals, companies, or even countries) make decisions that affect each other. The key point is that the outcome for each player depends not only on their own decisions but also on the decisions made by others.Key Points:1. Players: The decision-makers in the game.2. Strategies: The possible decisions or actions a player can take.3. Payoffs: The outcomes or rewards that result from the combination of all players' strategies.Example: Imagine two businesses, A and B, that are competing to sell a similar product. They each have to decide whether to set a high price or a low price. The profit each business makes (the payoff) depends on both their own pricing decision and the pricing decision of the other business.Scenario: Two friends, Alex and Taylor, are deciding whether to go to a movie or stay home. They both like watching movies together, but if one goes and the other stays home, neither of them enjoys it much. If both stay home, they get to hang out but don't get to see the movie.Question: Who are the players in this game, and what are their possible strategies?ChatGPT prompts to provide an answer. If I’m correct, it will progress my knowledge. This is valuable because understanding game theory, for me, helps me better understand possible negotiations or account strategies. Alice Evans writes an informative piece on developing AI-complementary skills that you might find useful. Whether you like it or not, these tools are here. It’s best to learn how to work with these tools quickly. I find that my thinking becomes expanded and my outputs more valuable.