Mutual Improvement

Your Money or Your Life

I read a book called Your Money or Your Life when I was in college, and I have to admit, it was life changing in terms of my relationship to money. The book helped kick off the voluntary simplicity movement and while it definitely has a New Age feel to it, which makes the punk rocker in me want to puke, the concepts in the book are widely applicable to anyone interested in changing their relationship with money.

The book outlines a nine-step approach to "financial independence" that takes you through looking at all the money you've earned in your life and making peace with the past, converting your income into a calculation of your "life energy" that makes you look at how much you spend just so you can earn more (you know the phenomenon of the car you need for the commute, the clothes you need for work, etc), and ultimately to charting your income and expenses so that you can find your "break even" point, where your passive income from savings (they somewhat controversially advocate investing only in bonds) is greater than your living expenses.

What I got most out of the book was a few key lessons. One, if you want to save money, write down everything you spend it on. That task is so excruciatingly painful, you'll quit spending money just to avoid having to write anything down. Another is that you can, and probably should, work both sides of the equation of income and expenses simultaneously. It's drudgery to save only by giving up luxuries or by taking on extra jobs, but somehow if you do both at once, you feel superhuman rather than subhuman, and the ducats can really pile up. Lastly, just the vision of charting a path toward a point where passive income pays for life expenses, especially when I was only 19, made a life changing impact.

Despite some reservations about the book, I find I recommend it to people over and over. Money is a store of value. We ought to reflect a bit more about what we trade away for it. Ultimately, you are going to spend a huge part of your life trading time for money -- and Your Money or Your Life is a great guide for making sure you get what you want out of the bargain. I just wish there was a more punk version of the same book!

I love Marvin Minsky

I've turned on the impatience emotion regarding Marvin Minsky's upcoming book, The Emotion Machine.  I pre-ordered the book a while ago and occassionally check up on it to see when it's going to ship.  The premise of the book is that emotions are the same as thinking.  Or rather, they are strategies for thinking.  We turn on emotions in order to enable certain kinds of problem solving, idea-generating, and decision-making that are evolutionarily suited for the situation.

I held myself over by reading a really old interview with Marvin.  I like this interview a lot because it's clear that the interviewer is overwhelmed with emotion regarding Minsky's ideas, and can barely hold back his irritation.

Look at this:

I think we all want smart machines, but I have trouble with the idea that we'll have emotional machines. They drive me crazy enough.

I don't know what you mean. You're using emotional in some wrong sense.

You don't want a sport utility vehicle going down the highway at 65 miles per hour that gets cut off, has the ability to recognize all the other traffic, recognizes that it was cut off and uses the same kind of rationale as a human being, gets angry and causes an accident.

No. I'm not saying that. You want a machine that has many ways of thinking. They don't have to be the same as people have. So you don't want to revert back to the old meaning of emotion, which is irrational behavior. What you want is to have lots of different ways that are good at solving the problem that you want to solve.

The rational thing for the 6-year-old to do is to kill the baby sister to have all the toys permanently and not get into these quarrels. So what you don't want is a rational machine that works things out logically. You want them to have many ways of looking at them and balance them.

Awesome.  I love his very rational way of sticking up for emotions.  I can't wait for the book to come out.

Read the interview: Moody Computers [eWeek.com]

Book Report

Following the chain of citations in a book you enjoy can be a great way to deepen your knowledge about a subject. Some time ago, I read Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink. As you may know, it is a book about how human judgment often functions instinctually, in a "blink" of an eye, rather than through a more drawn out cognitive process. It is full of great examples drawn from police work, real estate, aesthetics, and employment of how this process works (and sometimes fails). For me, it put me on a path toward rethinking my thinking and wanting to get a better understanding of my "feelings".

That book by Gladwell, along with the recommendation of a friend, led me to read Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy Wilson. In many ways, Wilson's book is about the same process Gladwell discusses, and Gladwell cites Wilson's work in Blink. Strangers to Ourselves discusses what Wilson calls the "evolutionary unconscious" a system we all rely on to do many of the things we think of as "being human". This brain network, far older than our neo-cortex, is responsible for allowing most of our senses to work in concert, but also for things like goal setting and decision-making. People who pride themselves on rationality might be surprised to learn that much of what they consider to be "rational" is actually transpiring on a sub-conscious level. Were we to ever meet someone lacking this "evolutionary unconscious" not only would they seem to lack the basic judgment we look for in other human beings -- they'd likely also be unable to see in 3 dimensions or keep their balance. While the functioning of the "neo-cortex" (our "new brain") gives us all sorts of mastery over language and argumentation, Wilson points out how it also leads to run-away confabulation. While the "evolutionary unconscious" makes snap decisions, our neocortex is capable of inventing some fairly loopy rationalizations for what transpired on a subconscious level.

One area Wilson explores that was particularly interesting to me was how it can be difficult to "know ourselves" because so much of who we are is shaped by unconscious processes we are not aware of, nor have any sort of direct access to. Ever have the feeling of really knowing who you are when you are around a close friend or loved one? That may be due to the ability to read the other person's reactions to yourself -- giving you the closest read on yourself you may be able to get. Wilson points out this is also the main value of therapy: it doesn't matter so much what form of training the therapist has bought into, the main value is in experiencing another persons largely subconscious reactions to what you have to say.

Wilson's book led me back toward one more book both he and Gladwell discuss, Antonio Demasio's Descarte's Error. At the heart of Demasio's work is what he call's the "somatic marker hypothesis" -- a fancy way of describing a "gut feeling" that helps us make decisions. Demasio discusses the case histories and experiments with individuals who have suffered brain lesions that have damaged parts of their brain involved in the sort of involuntary processing that Gladwell and Wilson describe. From this experimental record, Demasio argues that it is an error to think that what we think of as "being rational" is something apart from our feelings or emotions. Instead, we rely on "bodystate feelings" to feedback and feed-forward information that is crucial to forming sound judgment.

Our culture doesn't always reward emotion or feeling in decision-making or public deliberation -- it can seem like someone is "melting down" or "getting angry" when "bodystate" is visibile on the face of a leader -- but it's worth remembering that what we prize about good judgment relies on a whole interplay of feeling to reach decisions.