kurtiss.org | giving is receiving

…only fools optimize for wisdom. This is one of my favorite PG essays in a long while. Paul says this about those who optimize for smartness over wisdom,

Instead of obliterating your idiosyncrasies in an effort to make yourself a neutral vessel for the truth, you select one and try to grow it from a seedling into a tree.

So, it’s likely that someone who wants to be intelligent might be forced to optimize for wisdom when confronted with a relatively seedlingless landscape.

This post details a strategy I employ to optimize one of my scarcest resources: brainpower.

1. Don’t think, go with your gut.

If you’re a beginner, your gut is probably wrong. Experts can skip to step 3, otherwise,

2. Be surprised at how wrong you are.

This step is key. If you’re not surprised, and you don’t examine the ways in which you are wrong, you will not be able to use this technique to be right. If you find yourself spending time thinking about how right you are, you have not mastered this strategy.

Being surprised opens your senses, and puts you in one of the most effective positions to take in information. Now you are responsible for incorporating this information into your conceptual model of the specific problem domain and constructing as many metaphors across domains as possible.

With your newly minted conceptual model, you have strengthened your gut. Go back to step 1. If you were wrong and not surprised, you’ll find yourself being wrong over and over and over again.

3. Figure out why your gut was right after the fact.

If you’ve made it to this step, you understand the value of being surprised and being wrong. You also have an outstanding conceptual model of the problems you are dealing with. Enjoy being right, you’ve earned it. Ironically, at this stage, you’ve also learned that being right isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I decided to conclude my women’s issue media-themed weekend with Todd Haynes’ illegal, quasi-PSA/melodrama/biography about Karen Carpenter, Superstar. I was intrigued by the description of the film on Elvis Mitchell’s The Treatment. Having muddled through my feelings on some perplexing aspects of femininity beautified and celebrated by Almodovar, in his latest, Volver, I felt primed to tackle Superstar, come what may.

Karen Carpenter’s voice was a household sound during my childhood, maintaining a top position in the short list of my mom’s favorite music from her youth. There was a sadness to it that I didn’t understand, but I did somehow get that it couldn’t just have been “rainy days and mondays,” sad as they are.

Haynes tells the story of Karen’s battle with her popularity, her family, and her fatal encounter with anorexia. He does all this using Barbie dolls for actors. Yet, he manages to tug the heartstrings with life-size lighting, montage, and sound design.

The film’s score is made of unlicensed Carpenter’s tracks and some warbling 80s synth lines. The Carpenter’s tracks are strategically used to redeem, and quite effectively so. The synth can get downright scary, as it folds in to the wheeling, macabre screens that make up Haynes’ montage.

Ultimately, Karen is celebrated as as sort of sacrificial role model, who bore the brunt of an oppressive family and society. Her gravestone is beautiful, sad, and inspiring–like her legacy. The film rises above it’s self-imposed constraints to be wildly unsettling and gripping.

I finally signed up for yelp and wrote my first review.

I haven’t had a nightmare in ages, but I do have chaotic, sometimes apocalyptic dreams. One of the recurring themes features an ocean whose tide waxes against the beach, raising the sea level by several feet after each recession. Last night, I had my electronics spread out on the sandy turf. I woke up calmly, treading water, holding the macbook over my head, regretting the salt-encrusted loss of all its peripherals.

As I listened to Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s essay on NPR’s This I Believe, I grew steadily more excited, hearing my own feelings on belief and happiness echoed quite precisely. If you flip through my past posts, you will see that this essay even speaks using some of the same terminology as I do. I recommend listening to his reading, but here are a few excerpts that I identified with, in particular:

“For some of us, it seems, experience is the only teacher. I had to learn the hard way…I went through a few years of just getting lost…The depression or the loneliness that is both the cause and the effect of the whole vicious circle. I went far enough down to have to either change or die. I basically managed to break my own heart.

Learning that I had no wisdom on my own finally opened the way for me to learn from those who did… What I once considered empty platitudes are actually descriptions of fact. I finally discovered the beautiful, paradoxical truth that genuine concern for the welfare of others is the gateway to the only real satisfaction for myself. I cannot claim to consistently live up to this ideal, but it is with genuine gratitude that I can say I have come to believe the words of the Indian philosopher-poet Shantideva:”

“All the joy the world contains / Has come through wishing happiness for others. / All the misery the world contains / Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.”

If Only Her Highness

Josh tagged me, so here’s my list.

• I was denied a job at the See-Eye-Ay (doubt that’ll fool their spy-bots) because their polygraph test told me I was lying when I wasn’t. This was only the beginning of my disgust for ‘the man’.
• I have 100+ episodes of I Love Lucy on VHS tapes that I recorded from Nick @ Nite when I was about 13. And I’m straight.
• I’ve helped invent two sports: Ultimate Funnelball, and 2Wind 2Ball.
  Only one was fortunate enough to have been bestowed a strategy labelled, ‘Kiss of the Dragon’.
• I played World of Warcraft for one month, then quit. This is a great source of personal inspiration.
• I’ve only broken one bone in my entire life–my arm. It was in 3rd grade, and I was chasing a girl around the playground during recess (only the coolest 3rd graders did this). There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

I tag Bryan, Ryo, Greg, Mbwana, and Victoria. That is, if any of you are reading! Which brings up a good point: if you read this blog, and you have a blog of your own, please let me know!

Exhausted and crumpled on a couch where I know I shouldn’t be.  Tail too tired to wag, but door creaks and I perk.  Familiar smell followed by unfamiliar brings those curiosity pangs.  Worse than the hunger kind.  I am big and alpha.  It yips madly, so I spring and defend.

I don’t understand breeds, except this one’s mine.  She bears teeth first; I should’ve known better…I am alpha.  Then He shuts her up.  I hate having to defer.

Sniff that…it’s the usual.  It burns where my ear used to be.  Bite the scruff, I am alpha, she heels.  It burns where my ear used to be.  He rushes Yippie to the cages, while I chase.  Door to the face.

Burning ear grows heavy and head tilts with the weight.  New perspective reveals my tail.  Worth chasing?  It burns where my ear used to be.