Nvidia Recursion
If you take Ubers and find yourself occasionally baffled in how to exit the back seat, you’re probably in a Tesla. The pressure is on when you search for the door handle while your driver’s in a rush to get their next customer. The Tesla door handle is recessed, and I’m looking for a handle rather than the telltale outline in the interior that says handle here.
I felt under a different kind of pressure, that of disappointing my 14-year-old grandson, who had already waited over a month for a custom-built “gaming PC” from a company big in reputation and small in employee count. Dell and HP, the dominant Windows PC makers, construct office and home computers from cheap parts adequate to run Microsoft Office and a browser. But computer game players who are graduating from gaming consoles such as the Sony Playstation require big-cased computers that can house a large and expensive dedicated graphic processing unit (GPU) such as those made by Nvidia.
You may have heard of Nvidia. For most of their years, they were known as the graphics processor company that made increasingly powerful GPUs to service the ever-increasing graphics demands of modern computer games. Now they’re the top company in the history of capitalism, worth on paper (the NY Stock Exchange) four-trillion dollars. How did that happen?
Many hands make light work/ —A sentiment from the New Testament and a Chinese proverb
It turns out that the talent of the GPU to power computer graphics is the same talent that trains large language models (LLM) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. While the main engine of a computer is the central processing unit (CPU), the CPU can process only one instruction at a time. Modern CPUs are really fast but not nearly fast enough to push demanding modern computer graphics or train an LLM. While the CPU is processing one instruction at a time, the GPU is a parallel processor, which runs multiple instructions at a time. The CPU is a speedy modern train. The GPU is a freeway adjacent to the train tracks full of sports cars.
Because I “built” two computers in the past, I recognize all the parts inside my grandson’s computer, but I could not find the on switch. To be fair, I thought we had already turned on the computer with a toggle switch in the back, and I feared there was something wrong with the new machine or that we hadn’t hooked the display up correctly.
Because custom-built computers are built from a numerous variety of parts—only your willingness to spend is the limit—the builder can’t supply more than basic instructions for your particular order. After troubleshooting for an hour, I did a search on Google Gemini’s LLM—powered by billions of dollars of those linked parallel processing Nvidia GPUs—and Gemini explained that the on-off switch was recessed (like the Tesla door handle) in the black mental case, a switch difficult to discover in that dark bedroom. My grandson pushed the switch and the display lit up. Nvidia GPU to power the computer. Nvidia GPUs to learn how to turn the computer on.
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Notes
- Unless you’re working as an engineer for the designing company, one doesn’t actually build a PC. You push the components into the backbone circuit board (“motherboard”).
- A good GPU can cost more than all the rest of the computer’s components combined.
- Cultural artifacts are repurposed all the time. For example, a widely used medical blood thinner started as rat poison.
- I assume the first on switch sends power to the motherboard, and the recessed switch powers on the entire system.
He started it!
When my brother and I had childhood fights that were interrupted by our mother, we played the he started it card. Our mother, as grownups will do, attempted to discover the truth—who started it—and mete out consequences. More often than not, she gave up and both of us were sent to our rooms.
The he-started-it gambit is not limited to squabbling children. Adults are equally guilty. I look back at my time as a marriage counselor as I succumbed to he-started-it when I attempted to referee arguing couples. Eventually, I saw the light. I’d explain, “We’re wasting time and (your) money. You can have your fights at home.”
Most conflicts have no beginning or end, and The Palo Alto Mental Research Institute coined the term, punctuation, to describe that it’s arbitrary where you define the beginning of a conflict. Couples bring up transgressions from an hour ago, yesterday, and years past to back their grievances.
With couples who have a union of true love, while he-started-it conflicts may never go away, they’re rarely fatal to a marriage. Any intervention that convinces the parties that all attempts to win the argument are futile should be a winner. The arguments needn’t disappear, but just become less important than whether the Seahawks win their upcoming game.
Tragically, he-started-it isn’t just about childhood altercations and marital bickering. Many thousands and sometimes millions of lives are lost in like disagreements that result in war among tribes and nations.
The Treaty of Versailles can be punctuated as either the end of World War I or the beginning of World War II. The former, because the agreement formally ended the conflict between Germany and the Allied Powers: the latter because the penalties against Germany (especially the reparations) created such harsh economic conditions that it became the catalyst for Hitler’s political elevation.
We needn’t go back to old conflicts. Journalists accompany reports on current strife in the Middle East and between Russia and Ukraine by invoking history many decades past, and the conflicting parties in the Middle East slaughter each other with justifications that go back centuries. Those historical he-started-its are run-on sentences with lots of commas and conjunctions that would not be tolerated by grammar scolds.
When it comes down to it, he-started-it is bullshit. Most wars are just, fuck you! I want what I want.
Agency, the Only Vaccine for Big Tech
The COVID epidemic isn’t far from memory, and those of us who *believe * in science waited impatiently for each new vaccination to help ward off the most recent evolution of the COVID variant. As time went on, rather than making a vaccine for each new strain of COVID, the pharmaceutical companies created polyvalent vaccines to deal with the rapid evolution of a COVID-causing virus.
In recent years, Big Tech has brought us an endless series of personal agency-killing viruses: social media, YouTube, Google, AI, smartphones, Netflix, porn, Amazon—we’re surrounded by interests that want to dominate our attention. We’re surrounded by interests that want to influence how we spend our money, what we eat, how we’re entertained, and how we vote. And we don’t have a pharmaceutical-like polyvalent solution to deal with Silicon Valley viruses.
We could pass laws that put restrictions on these influences, that is, if these tech companies didn’t own Congress. We could take away phones from students while they’re attending school, but how would we deal with an epidemic of phantom limb pain? We could require age limits on Websites, but who gets to decide what’s inappropriate for everyone’s children? And, anyway, motivated young people find a way to route around restrictions.
COVID vaccines did not eliminate infection. They made infection less likely or the effects less severe. We need similar immunizations for the pernicious influences brought to us by Big Tech. And as with the COVID vaccines, they need to be polyvalent to fend off the move-fast-and-break-things strategy of Silicon Valley’s financial interests. For better or worse, these immunizations won’t come from the outside as they did with vaccines.
Sigmund Freud was wrong about many things, but he was right about one: we carry our childhoods with us. If we’re determined, occasionally we can chain our childhood wounds to the bed frame and sneak out the back door for some respite, but our childhood is always the troll under the bridge ready to pounce on our emotions.
If there’s an intervention that will foster agency in our children, agency that leaves them less emotionally vulnerable, it won’t come from trigger warnings, safe spaces, or an emotional support animal. They’re going to have to carry their agency with them, perhaps in their back pocket right next to their iPhone.
I’ve witnessed two general approaches to parenting: raise your children the way you were raised or raise your children the way you wish you were raised. The way you wish you were raised is often that you were given increased agency, that rather than controlling your decisions, your parents gave you latitude.
Too often (or most often), we spend our entire adult lives trying to retrieve what was suppressed during childhood. We change college majors, we change careers, we change locations, we change our politics, we change friends, we change love mates, we change therapists, all in pursuit of the self we think we could have been, if given the freedom to explore, if given the freedom to not pursue approval from our parents and cultural influences.
Alternately, we could raise children to maximize their agency and minimize a future of regrets and therapy bills.
Easy for me to say
I’m going to quote from a previous article:
Bria Bloom recently posted an essay of her witnessing an interaction between a mother and the mother’s (about) ten-year-old daughter. The mother is playing with her daughter’s hair, treating it as if it belonged to a doll, while ignoring her daughter’s repeated requests to stop. Daughter and mother both persist, until her mother finally stops and calls her daughter a brat.
If you stop reading Bria’s essay at this point, you’d probably think nothing of the incident—children and parents will be children and parents. But if you read further, Bria makes an unexpected connection: the insistent (pardon) manhandling of the daughter, despite her protests, is inadvertently training the daughter to accept that her body is not her own; that without consent, she should allow her body to be invaded by another’s behavior.
Bria’s interpretation startled me. When the above “training” is practiced by a sexual predator, it’s called something really creepy, “grooming,” getting a child used to accepting physical invasion—sexual invasion.
Notice how subtle this inadvertent grooming takes place. The mother was being playful, but by rejecting her daughter’s wishes, she satisfied her own needs regardless of her daughter’s wishes. What does that remind you of?
I hope to point out that early denials of agency can be innocent and even loving, but the experience of being manhandled (sorry) is felt regardless of good intentions. Influence largely takes place below one’s awareness.
Now carry this denial of agency to the countless experiences children are subjected to—“for their own good”—and your child is being conditioned to being swayed by all the “influencers” on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit. Add to the above social media influences, school cliques, and campus culture. Let’s not forget our most recent addition, chatty large language models such as ChatGPT. **
How to foster agency
Blah, blah, blah. Even if I agree with you, what can I do? How can I guard my children’s agency?
As I implied above, not taking away agency has a lot to do with what you don’t do. As a parent or any adult authority, stifling your agency-killing behavior is hard and takes practice. It takes, initially at least, awareness of your habits and motivations and awareness of your effect on children.
But before I go on, I’ll add that, as you practice restraint with those whom you have authority over, you are increasing your agency. How we treat our children in turn bounces back to us. We see the effects on them and feel good rather than the too-common feelings among parents of regret and guilt.
As a bonus to ourselves and others, we might even develop more restraint in trying to control the behavior of our mates and coworkers. As a second bonus, we become better models for our children and possibly better models for family members and friends.
How-to
You don’t need me
—Professor Robert Suczek
I had a therapy supervisor who fit my personality perfectly. Perhaps he saw that I was allergic to authority.
You don’t need me was Suczek’s guiding principle in working with clients. He treated them as individuals who were competent but had lost confidence and needed to be reminded of their competence so they could take back their agency.
Following the Suczek principle, it would be paradoxical for me to create a how-to manual on how to raise your children. But I’ll offer suggestions specifically around agency based on my experience as a parent and family therapist.
My wife and I kept our kids home from school and allowed them as much agency as felt safe in accordance with their age. Most parents have neither the inclination nor the practical situation to homeschool, but there are other ways to foster agency.
In any conflict with authorities, we didn’t take the side of the institution. When necessary, we took our child’s side by being a problem-solver. You have to be here and get along with authorities who may be unreasonable. How can we deal with this conflict in a way that will bring you less stress?
The problem-solving mindset helped our kids deal with any situation, but more importantly, gave them a tool for the long run.
You don’t need to be a parent to growing children or a parent at all to foster the agency of others. You can be an older sibling, aunt or uncle, grandparent, teacher, boss, or an individual someone looks up to.
Raise your children to maximize their agency and minimize a future of regrets and therapy bills. Raise your children to maximize their agency and they will not worship the shallow “influencers” on social media. They will be less prone to a life of anxiety and depression. They will not join a cult or support authoritarian politicians. They will be less likely to regret their choice of careers or their choice of mates.
If you think it’s too late because your offspring are 15 and 17, remember, people attend therapy to retrieve their agency well into adulthood. It’s never too late to foster agency. If you attempt to shut off influences aimed at your older teenagers, what happens when they leave home without your shield? Don’t eliminate, vaccinate.
Notes
- Science happens whether or not you believe in it. If you didn’t believe in gravity, you still couldn’t break the high jump record. (To change your world by disbelief in science would make a novel superhero series.)
- Latitude is not neglect.
- I use the term “homeschool” because it’s the common label. But there was very little school in our version. The self-directed education model is mostly accurate.
- No matter how you raise your children, nothing is guaranteed; there are many influences in children’s lives that parents can’t control. However, children raised with agency will have better resilience no matter what they encounter.
Resources
The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik, Emeritus Professor, UC Berkeley, is a developmental psychologist, and the above book is the best book on raising your children with agency (though she never uses that term). While the carpenter crafts to a desired end product, the gardener nurtures with love and protection.
Peter Gray writes a column in Psychology Today and writes a newsletter. Peter Gray is a research psychologist at Boston College. He’s the co-founder of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, which assists homeschoolers and the homeschooling curious with resources.
Bria Bloom’s newsletter. Bria’s focus is on the emotional life of children. She illustrates with her experiences raising her children to keep their agency intact.
My essays, Hard Fun, and Habitability, part 3: Unintended Consequences.
Agency, How to Lose It
People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
—Gregory Bateson
I’m walking here!
—Ratso Rizzo
You’re standing on a sidewalk adjacent to a busy street, and you’re late to your appointment that’s on the other side of the speeding traffic. You have a choice: you can hope for an opening through the multi-ton vehicles racing past, or you can walk to the end of the long urban block, push the walk button, and wait for the traffic-light gods to smile on you.
Jaywalking laws came about in the late 1920s from a hard push by the auto industry. Before jaywalking laws, it was the automobile, not pedestrians, that had to be predictable.
Move fast and break things
—Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder
When Zuckerberg was clawing his company’s way to the top, his “move fast and break things” mantra served its purpose. So it is with budding (and perhaps soon to die) artificial intelligence (AI). Move fast because we’re in a race with China. Break things because only AI can fix the things it breaks. (No, I don’t understand that logic either, but if you say it fast enough…)
What a computer is to me is that it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
—Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was defining the computer as a personal agency device. Funny, isn’t it, that a few years later, Jobs would introduce the bicycle lock for our minds, our minds locked to our iPhones that are locked to pernicious social media? The promise of increased personal agency, from the personal computer, then from the Web, then from the computer in our pocket, turned out to be a Trojan Horse.
While we thought we were becoming more productive and more entertained, we were being fed algorithms that produced regenerative feedback loops—what we call addictions—by the huge corporations that dominate our eyes and ears. And now that we’re off-balance, AI is coming to finish the job of killing off personal agency for good. It will be worthwhile, we’re told because we’ll have AI servants that will make us dinner reservations.
While I’m skeptical that, as some fear, artificial intelligence will get angry and kill us, literally, I believe the real threat is that AI will pacify us to the point of cultural suicide.
Big tech spends billions to just show us more ads for products, but who’s going to have money to buy these products when AI takes over the jobs of the middle class? I’m a little confused.
Notes
- I’m certain Steve Jobs would be disgusted by the exploitation from social media of the greatest communication device ever invented. Jobs had his faults, but crassness was not among them.
AI is Coming For Our Mind Maps: If you think screens have been bad for us, just wait until AI arrives.
Vocabulary
AI: ideas and behavior that would be considered intelligent if done by a human.
AI agent: an artificial administrative assistant.
LLM (Large language model): AI software that predicts the next token. A token is a word or part of a word that the LLM uses to predict the next token. So a word or part of a word is fed to the LLM to predict the rest of the word, or another part of the word, and so on, which then predicts the next word in a phrase. LLM-trained AI is the model that Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and nearly all AI companies are pushing and is just a super superset of the predictive text feature on your smartphone.
Siri: Apple’s built-in AI agent. On an Android device, the equivalent is Google Assistant.
Instead of trying to build a machine that thinks like a corporate intern, we should be trying to build a machine that learns like a four-year-old./ —Alison Gopnik
Yesterday, she made mud pies by stomping the mud with her bare feet and shaping the wet confection with her hands. But today, our not quite four-year-old granddaughter turned fastidious. She frowned at the bits of mud splattered on her little pink bike and dispatched one of her staff, Nana, to get a bucket of water, a sponge, and a drying cloth. After cleaning the bike and some further riding, she came in to wash her hands in our downstairs bathroom.
Nova is both young and tiny for her age, so we usually help her with the soap pump. When I peeked into the bathroom to see if she needed assistance, she was sitting on the floor, the soap dispenser in front of her atop the step stool. Using what little body weight she has, she perched over the pump to push out the liquid.
Her soap dispenser trick was her third new acquired skill I had witnessed in two days. Earlier, when riding her bike, after every few forward cycles of her bike wheels, she would reverse the pedals to brake. My earlier efforts to teach her to brake had gone nowhere, but she listens to Daddy, and now she was practicing and taking delight in her newfound control.
The third new skill I noticed was when she and Nana were making bookmarks with cardboard and color tape. Nana suggested that she (Nana) would cut the tape and Nova could place the tape on the cardboard strips. Before Nana could finish her suggestion, Nova was pressing the tape on the table with the end overhanging the table edge. Set that way, without help, Nova could cut the tape with her scissors. Her surprised grandmother asked Nova where she learned that?
“Preschool.”
These were not just three new skills but new skills learned in distinct ways: the soap pump trick came from experimentation on her own, the braking skill from coaching by her father, and the scissors cutting trick from modeling by her teacher.
From the day she was born, Nova, as every child, was accumulating mind maps of how to accomplish tasks, but not just isolated tasks. An observer may see one skill learned at a time, but most skills are interrelated. She was learning and learning to learn.
Nineteen years earlier, on the day she turned sixteen, Nova’s mother, Bria, made me beg the DMV tester to wait until I raced home and got her forgotten birth certificate. Bria was determined to drive herself to karate class that evening. Bria’s older brother, in contrast, showed little interest in driving until he was over 20. I was confused until I hit on the reason. Both Adam and Bria had learned the skills to direct a car through traffic and pass the driving test, but only Bria had acquired a mind map of where she was in relation to her destinations. Bria’s thoughts were, by her nature, out in the world. She was a mental cartographer of relationships and of places to meet the people who made up those relationships. In contrast, Adam had developed mind maps that fortified his inner world—maps of complex games played on a table and played on a screen, maps of programming computers, maps of the science texts and literature I sent his way as a homeschooled kid. At the time, he had just enough of a mind map of interpersonal relationships to share his gaming interests with a few close friends.
Adam’s mind maps, in contrast to those of his sister, did not include his environment. I made a guess that he didn’t drive because he didn’t know how to get anywhere. (This was before smartphones.) I bought a Garmin car navigation device and mounted it on our car’s dashboard. When he next returned from his college year in Minnesota, I was proved right when he announced, “I want to go places.”
Map making
The making of Nova’s new skills and the road navigation by Bria and Adam might appear to have little in common, but they’re much the same. Skill acquisition is done by acquiring a mind map by building on those already gained. When American explorers Lewis and Clark mapped the West, there were no flyovers to show the territory they would cover. They had to create their maps by noting the territory as they moved through it.
A concept is assembled like a jigsaw puzzle, as pieces that include clues about how they fit together. You might think you grasp an idea whole, but that’s because the puzzle pieces are submerged in your subconscious. When that puzzle is finally assembled in your mind, you have a new conceptual tool to apply to other challenges.
Process knowledge
This last year (2025), two noted business books that compared industry in China to industry in the U.S. were published: Apple in China, by Patrick McGee, and Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang. While each book has a different emphasis, put together their overall premise is that Apple engineers taught Chinese engineers the rapid and high-quality manufacture of high-tech devices. And through years of refining these techniques, China has acquired process knowledge to the level that no other countries can compete.
Process knowledge is the means of turning engineers’ blueprints into goods. It takes decades of design and corrective feedback to attain that competence.
For a human being, the knowledge blueprints are inborn genetics plus instruction you get from texts, lectures, mentors, and teachers, but that which sticks comes from doing. Process knowledge is a businessy term for learning-by-doing, a concept that formally dates back to John Dewey but must have been implicitly understood at the beginning of familial and tribal guidance.
Learning by doing is the creation of mind maps that Nova illustrated at the top of this essay. It’s how Nova’s mother created her maps of her environment so she could navigate as a driver. It’s how Adam created maps of games and software development.
AI
I don’t need help
—Nova
A tiny person who uses her body weight to operate the soap dispenser is learning to be a problem solver. As long as Nova’s parents, grandparents, and other grownups are available to augment Nova’s (lack of) muscle development, she doesn’t need to invent a solution. Overly helpful adults can interfere with a child’s development of process knowledge. AI has the potential to obliterate it. Siri, dispense soap.
Most parents learn to back off as their children become more competent. They’re relieved that they have less to do and are proud their kids are maturing. AI has no experience with the development of process knowledge. It has no inner world to draw from that could make it sensitive to a child’s desire to be competent and viewed as competent.
The attraction of AI, especially agents, is that they’ll do the drudge work for us—make dinner reservations so we can focus on the important, the creative, the fun stuff. But most learning starts with drudge work, such as… well, everything. We start a task. If it’s long and repetitive, we invent shortcuts. Our creative flow yields better shortcuts. If AI replaces the shortcuts we would have invented so we can focus on creative work, then AI contradicts its own value.
The not-so-hated repetitive tasks
What exactly is AI going to give us relief from, and do we want relief from that?
Stardew Valley is the eleventh best-selling computer game of all time. Stardew Valley is, first of all, a farm simulation. The heart of the game is planting, watering, and harvesting crops—a task needed daily. Lots of other chores, events, and socializing are available in the game, but the repetition of farming is the game’s staple. Stardew Valley is just one farming-centric game among many. Unpacking) comprises unpacking your possessions after a move. Other popular games are designed around simple tasks, such as power washing, truck driving, running a coffee shop, or running a diner. But these are just the obvious titles that feature what sounds like tedious work when thought of in real life. With many games, likely most, your time is spent working to level-up so you can beat ever more dangerous foes. Does that sound like fun? Hint: it’s called grinding.
There are many forms of grinding in daily life that people enjoy, such as weeding their yard, knitting, home improvement, assembling puzzles, or practicing with repetition of an athletic skill.
What could be the attraction to these seemingly dull exercises? What these games, hobbies, and maintenance activities have in common is the feeling of controlling a finite area of life or the fantasy (with a game) of controlling a finite area of life. This suggests to us that many tasks taken over by AI will cause us to replace them with similar tasks, but as play. You’ll tell LLM-infested Siri to plan your vacation to Disney World and make the reservations for hotel, rental car, and restaurants. On the plane carrying you to Disney World, you’ll play a game on your phone where you manually plan your trip to Disney World and make reservations for hotel, rental car, and restaurants.
Look around your workspace, your kitchen, your toolbox. Simple mechanical gadgets such as can openers, scissors, water kettle, toaster, screwdriver, hammer—every one of them conceived and invented by trial and error, by an evolving process knowledge. Where will we get new process knowledge after we’ve offloaded problem-solving to AI? If we feed all the mechanical inventions of the past into our LLM database and tell our AI-infused 3D printer to create a desired gadget, without our involvement, without our tinkering, how will we then know how to improve our new gadget or what new gadget to create? Nova has already improved her soap pump trick by moving the dispenser from the step stool to the closed lid toilet; she gets more leverage by standing over the dispenser while pressing. Process knowledge.
If their parents are using AI, any thought that kids will be kept from it is absurd. We know that from past experience with technology. Busy and exhausted parents find relief in setting their little children in front of the television, or more commonly today, an iPad. What are the chances parents won’t offload their kids to AI? Robby the Robot will help you with your Lego puzzle or homework. Or teach you to brake your bicycle. And the motivated and smart older kids will route around limits such as age-gating and other what-about-the-children panic laws that never work.
As a culture, do we ever learn? After the modern miracle of the Internet and specifically social media, where we were sold the idea that we’d learn to better understand each other and respect our differences, we’re now going to buy yet another fantasy of an improved culture, an improved culture sold again by high-tech leaders who lack people skills.
I believe that AI in general, and agents in particular, will be worse than social media. AI will stifle learning in both children and adults. But even if I’m wrong about AI, that agents will destroy early process knowledge, there’ll be other negative consequences we can’t predict. There always are. When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he envisioned low-friction collaboration among scholars. What he got is the opposite: domination by one storefront, one search engine, and a handful of social media platforms that thrive on grievance.
Unintended consequences are a myth. There are just consequences we can’t predict. Every significant technological advance brings forth changes we regret. The legal and cultural solutions to reverse the changes we don’t like do not send us back in time. They’re just further changes that often make the cure worse than the disease in an ongoing game of Wackamole. Undo works in only software.
Given the thought experiments about going back in time to kill baby Hitler, I bet many would like to go back in time and kill Facebook, Twitter, and maybe even the iPhone. Ten years from now, we’ll have wished we killed the AI that’s coming for our process knowledge when we had the chance.
AI
AI intends to take away our stepping through life to create our mind maps. That’s AI’s marketing gambit but reframed in a positive light. More likely, it will make us so stupid we’ll become increasingly dependent on AI. (Can you calculate without a calculator?) Besides making us dependent and stupid, chances are these agents won’t work well. Higher-cost meta-bots that correct the errors of standard bots will come. Then higher, higher-cost meta-meta bots. And so on. We’ll be stupid and broke.
Resources
There are many resources that question the value of AI. The following are just the ones most related to my essay.
My related articles:
Why the Metaverse Ain’t Gonna Happen
Habitability, part 1: Not Julia Child
Habitability, part 3: Unintended Consequences
Addiction is Just a Word (Explains cybernetic feedback.)
Books:
The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, Alison Gopnik
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett
That's not immersion, you have a fucking helmet on your head!
I am reminded of a passage in Tocqueville where he noticed that America seemed to be on a trajectory that would have it erecting “an immense tutelary power” that wants only what is best for us, and is keen to “save us the trouble of living."
—John Naughton
In my childhood home of Los Angeles, when TV antennas still dotted rooftops, we had the most TV channels in the nation: three national networks and four local channels.
The local channels couldn’t finance their own shows, so they filled the airwaves with old movies. This was the media era of bloodless violence and post-World War II American dominance. In those movies, John Wayne won world wars and defeated American Indians. James Arness put down villains with quick draws, Errol Flynn wielded pirate swords, and armor-clad Robert Wagner fought with a knight’s flat-edged sword. Those were the days.
In the fifties in the San Fernando Valley, new housing tracts sprung like backyard weeds, and on weekends, I’d walk through the framed but yet-to-be walled homes to liberate discarded wood scrapes from which I assembled weapons inspired by the above shows. A favorite was a rubber-band gun, because it shot real (but harmless) “bullets.” I’d saw ten inches off a two-by-four and hammer a small nail into a spring-enabled clothes pin. As I further searched through the not-yet houses, I was rewarded with additional fantasy tools hiding in plain sight such as wood trim to create swords. If I were lucky, I’d find a scattering of nickel-sized punch outs from electrical boxes—perfect for pirate gold. If I were unlucky, I’d bring home the unwanted souvenir of a nail that punched through my shoe and punctured my heel. In those days, kids were expected to get injuries, so my only consequence was a trip to the doctor for a tetanus shot.
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In the Netflix era, there are more streaming services than the bygone TV antenna era had individual channels, and the popular services have an avalanche of shows. A writer (whose name I don’t recall) suggested that this oversupply of manufactured fantasy puts a damper on the development of children’s imaginations. In the pre-streaming era, just one of those movies or network TV shows could sustain a young child’s fantasy play, as it did mine, for years. But, today, why role play from memories of an old show when dozens of new shows are a click away?
Faux
I backed off when I realized I was invading singer Alicia Keyes personal space. She was on stage performing, and I was nearly draping her from the front. Weirdly, she didn’t notice and continued to sing. It felt like a dream, but I was actually in a crowded Apple store. My head was strapped into Apple’s new virtual-reality helmet, the Apple Vision Pro, and I was near the end of the demo.
The make-believe closeness with Keyes was the finale of the demonstration. The wild animals that passed mere feet from me before I ducked into the safety of the nightclub were intimidating, but the encounter with Keyes felt worse. Better to be mauled than commit a faux pas.
While Apple touts the Vision Pro as a viable productivity device (which currently only works as such in conjunction with a Mac), hardly anyone who’s tried one views it as anything but an entertainment device. At $3500, it’s a really expensive entertainment device, a really expensive entertainment device that can be used by only one person at a time. This doesn’t mean that future versions won’t be far cheaper and may evolve to a productivity device, but despite engineers’ passions and management’s prognostications, devices find their users. Apple thought the iPad would replace the Mac and that the Apple Watch would compete with smart phones, but the iPad is used mostly to consume video and the watch has become primarily a health aid.
Apple is trying to save us the trouble of living
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, promoted the motto, a “bicycle for the mind,” that is, a technology that augments an inborn human capability, as the guiding concept for Apple products, and Jobs favored commercials for Apple that emphasized their products as tools for creativity. If he believed that, he was fooling himself. His favorite term of derision was “bozos,” which meant those who weren’t the best of the best. The Apple commercial, Here’s for the crazy ones, didn’t feature you and me making something with an Apple product, it featured (voiced by Jobs himself) the likes of Picasso, Einstein, Gandhi, and Earhart who, by the way managed their creativity and excellence without an Apple product. But apparently, you can’t sell a billion devices if you restrict your sales to “the crazy ones.” In contrast to the “bicycle for the mind” motto, most of Apple’s products since the 1980s have been designed as an easy chair for the mind, designed for entertainment not for creativity.
As everyone knows (or should know), ignore what people say, watch what they do. Since Steve Jobs retirement from Apple and subsequent passing, Apple’s marketing has implied that Apple product buyers are the “crazy ones,” in this case, they mean to flatter their users as the creative ones, who in another of their former ad campaigns, “think different.”
It’s wax-on, wax-off all the way down
One of the most iconic scenes in movies is from the original Karate Kid movie. Mr. Miyagi begins his instruction with his teen student, Daniel, by having Daniel perform repetitive tasks such as painting a fence with up and down and side-to-side strokes. After days of this seemingly irrelevant task, Daniel objects. Miyagi demonstrates that the painting motions were the same as karate blocks and have become installed in Daniel’s muscle memory. It is, of course, not muscle memory, it’s nervous system memory earned from learning by doing, which now goes by a fancier term in modern cognitive science, embodied cognition.
Our mind map (what we call reality) is assembled from experiences, experiences of movement that we interpret to ourselves using language. Medical students, interns, and residents engage in patient rounds that make meaning from anatomy and chemistry books. Cooks prepare food to make recipes come alive. Even when just reading, your mind is moving— interacting with words based on experiences.
We’ve got so impressed with improvements in displays and computer graphics, in shows as well as on computer screens, that we don’t appreciate how far away they are from creating a more than superficial cognitive experience. No matter what Apple claims, the Vision Pro isn’t a virtual or augmented reality device, it’s a fancy 3D screen you wear as a helmet. If there’s a virtual reality device in our future, its future is on the same timeline as the ubiquitous, go-anywhere self-driving car, the timeline of “in the future.” I believe the Vision Pro is already being used in flight and surgery simulations to teach. That specialized use case sounds about right. To that, I hope and expect an eventual replacement for graduated lenses in eyeglasses, where the whole lens changes instantly to your directed object distance. I can’t be the only one who hates walking down steps because graduated lenses moves the perceived distance when you glance downward.
Notes
- Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, and the founder of the first U.S. cognitive science department (at Harvard), Jerome Bruner, laid down the modern foundation of learning by doing. Apple’s Vision Pro is both a virtual reality device—the device dominates your senses—and an augmented reality device—your senses are enhanced. I didn’t understand augmented reality until someone pointed out that eyeglasses and hearing aids augment reality.
- You see in the news that self-driving cars are happening, but they’re traveling on only limited, well-defined roads. Self-driving is to human driving as a small school district in a homogenous community is to the United Nations.
How to Create Dangerous People, Part 2: Mean Boys
There was a time in my life when I was feeling worthless and unloved. I hired a prostitute solely to tell me that I’m a hunk and that she loved me.
That was fiction. Of what value could there be in flattery and declarations of affection that were bought?
Early in Donald Trump’s first term as President, in a Cabinet meeting, Trump directed the Cabinet members seated around the table to praise him, which they did with great enthusiasm. The press interpreted the incident as evidence that Trump values loyalty above all. I disagree. I believe that Trump craves praise and approval above all.
The authoritarians
What do Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Franco, and Pol Pot have in common? Besides being men, there are two commonalities: they all were oppressive authoritarian rulers of their countries, and they all had fathers who were described as cold, distant, authoritarian, emotionally abusive, and often physically abusive. The sons of these cold, abusive fathers scare, scowl, and emanate threat, but just want Daddy’s approval.
Hurt people
Hurt people hurt people
—Charles Eads (repeated without attribution by others)
As I write this, Elon Musk is in charge of gutting U.S. federal services that help the most vulnerable while being supported wholeheartedly (an oxymoron) by President Trump. What do Musk and Trump have in common? The same sort of relationship with their fathers as did the above cruel authoritarian leaders.
Burn the ships
The tactic to “burn the ships,” which ensures there’s no way to retreat—moving forward is the only way to survive—may have been used by Alexander the Great, and later, famously by Hernán Cortés in 1519 to motivate his men to conquer the Aztecs in Mexico. The strategy being used by Elon Musk in service of the Trump administration is to apply burn the ships to the federal government: gut or eliminate the institutions that have maintained the U.S. as a democracy over time.
Burn the ships is not just a tactic to destroy the means to return to a previous geographical home. It’s also a way to burn the past, the past humiliation from an abusive father, and in Trump’s case, the past humiliation of losing an election and being tried and convicted of numerous felonies. What better way to leave behind all your shames than to burn the ships? Since I can’t get your approval, I will burn the past of when I was demeaned.
In addition to the above, Trump and Musk have scuttled trade and defense alliances and dropped the guillotine on the entire U.S. electorate: your head goes one way, your body goes the other—you’re all fucked.
Those who voted in Trump and his proxy, Musk, wittingly or unwittingly voted to burn the ships.
When I wrote about the metaverse, I contended that Mark Zuckerberg’s motivation was to level the playing field, that is, the social field where his and those of his fellow techbros’ impoverished social skills could be hidden behind cartoon figures. Trump is also leveling the playing field to hide his impoverished personality. He’s good at only war: business as war, elections as war, all relations as war, but it’s war for cowards who play tough guys in front of the bathroom mirror as Robert De Niro’s character did in Taxi Driver: “You talking to me?”
The in-group for these boys wearing Daddy’s too-big suit is celebrity, external validation, and control. Their out-group is all the sources of their inferiority they fantasize they’ve left behind.
As Russian despot Vladimir Putin sacrifices the lives of his countrymen in attempts to annex Ukraine, Trump is making threats to annex Canada, the Panama Canal, and Greenland. Trump’s bizarre threats can be explained as Putin is the one daddy from whom Trump wishes to gain approval.
How to Create Dangerous People, Part 1: Mean Girls
“No one kidnapped and blindfolded you! You should resign from the forum!”
Sheesh, some people can’t take a joke.
Our homeschooled kids didn’t fit with the crowd that does so for religious reasons—the majority of homeschoolers—so our son and daughter were isolated from most homeschooled children. During their preteen years, their friends came from the neighborhood and from our Aikido dojo. Our son, Adam, was content to spend his spare time online or solo-waring in his tabletop and computer games. Our more socially inclined daughter, Bria, was impatient for her neighborhood friends to return from school.
Bria’s life would soon improve. A teacher in our school district had a plan to open an online resource center to serve homeschooled students. While the original name “Cyberschool” survived for years, parents (not us) demanded in-person classes with schoolteachers.1 Over the next half-dozen years, the district moved us to a series of abandoned school plants.
Out with the old
After we were moved to the third abandoned school, the district renamed the resource center—wait for it—the Edmonds Homeschool Resource Center (EHRC). Once the building relic was cleaned and checked for zombies, the school district installed a new principal who, conflict avoidant, immediately offloaded his authority so he could devote his time to shuffling papers. In the authority vacuum, a parent committee was formed by the type of parents who form parent committees. First task: create a rules and regulations handbook. While in the right context, rules and regulations may be necessary, in the wrong context, rule makers must manufacture their reason for existence.
EHRC was a wink-wink, win-win agreement for the school district to reacquire school funds previously lost due to children not enrolled in traditional schools. All that was officially required at Cyberschool was for parents to meet Washington State law by filing an intent to homeschool and for a parent to meet with a supervising teacher once a semester to go over the child’s learning plan. The plan could include classes at EHRC, lessons at home, and contracted instruction as we did for martial arts classes.
This setup worked for our two children, who were able to satisfy their world language requirements to apply for college and worked especially for Bria, who continued for years enjoying Spanish language, American Sign Language, and musical theatre.
The EHRC plant was a ten-minute bus ride from our home; their time away from home gave Bria and her older brother respite from their parents’ direct supervision. After Adam satisfied his world language requirement, he attended EHRC only to teach a computer programming class. That meant Bria traveled to EHRC on her own.
Mean girls
I want to be in the club that won’t have me as a member.
—Not Groucho Marx
All was fine until the parent committee discovered their cause: stretch their authority to other homeschooled children and their parents and enter the cool kids clubhouse they were shut out of in their school days. Finally, we’re the mean girls.
While the parents who nested in the EHRC gym all day were now the cool kids, there had to be uncool kids because every in-group requires an out-group. The parents who didn’t nest in the EHRC gym all day were dubbed the “drop-off parents.”
To corral the drop-off parents, the parent committee established a rule that children under 16 must have a parent present to supervise. This would affect 14-year–old Bria as well as me, so I created an online forum to actively oppose the new rule. Today, most would start a Facebook group, but this preceded Facebook and other popular social media. I chose forum software and installed it on a hosting service.
EHRC had no digital record of parents’ email accounts, so I manually copied about 80 EHRC family accounts from a paper listing, a chore for this lousy typist. I invited parents, teachers, and the Principal to join. I included a manifesto with two major points. First, I stated that I did not recognize the authority of the committee; only the Principal and the Assistant Superintendent of the district had authority over EHRC. Second, nearly all the support staff who worked at EHRC were parents of the attending children. (They created and took jobs at EHRC without an official district process.) These parents claimed they were following the new rules by being present, but I contended that they could not claim to be supervising their children while being paid by the school district. I added (well, threatened) that I would schedule an appointment with the Assistant Superintendent to discuss the matter.2
I was pleased with the participation in the forum. Teachers as well as parents posted, and both sides were represented. To set a tone, I made it clear that if “drop-off” parents was used as a slur, I would counter with “hang-around” parents.
The spy who didn’t love me
Because I like to have fun when I write, on the forum, I posted a story inspired by the then popular TV series, Alias, starring Jennifer Garner as a spy who wears stylish clothing while kicking ass—the usual for women spies. I wrote that I was blindfolded and kidnapped by members of the parents’ committee. Everyone took it with the humor intended, except for one participant who angrily insisted I resign from the forum. I gently pointed out that it was my forum and suggested that he or anyone else were welcome to create their own forum. Other than him, all were cordial to me in the forum and later in an all-hands meeting at the school.
In-groups and out-groups
No matter how old or accomplished we eventually become, we carry our childhoods with us.3 Many whose egos were injured because they weren’t one of the cool kids in their school days will never give up the pursuit.
School is the typical place to encounter mean girls (a generic term for any who form exclusive in-groups and bully manufactured out-groups), but even families have in-groups and out-groups.4 That’s for part two: Mean Boys.
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What these parents really wanted, as became obvious, was a taxpayer-funded near conventional school, where they could keep their kids away from “bad influences” such as hearing four-letter words, observing kissing in the hallways, and associating with gay children. ↩︎
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In retrospect. I didn’t need to create the forum. Just my threat would have been sufficient. But I’m glad I did, as I got to take the pulse of the culture. ↩︎
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Sigmund Freud based his entire psychoanalytic theory on that we carry our childhoods with us, but he thought it was all about getting stuck in some psycho-sexual age of development. Only the most hardcore psychoanalysts believe that today—about as many who still believe the earth is flat. ↩︎
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The famous family therapists, Jay Haley and Salvador Minuchin believed that families create parent and children alliances against the other parent and children. Sometimes, it’s siblings against siblings. ↩︎
You Can't Change Just the One Part You Don't Like
A marriage counseling session is improv: the plot is developed by the characters in real time. Note that the only skill the therapist needs is curiosity.
Chris: We think our lack of communication is ruining our marriage.
T: {to Stacy} You agree? Does Chris speak for both of you?
Stacy: Um, I guess so.
T: Why are you guessing?
Stacy: Well, Chris thinks so.
T: And Chris may be right but maybe not?
Stacy: Sorta
T: {to Chris} Can you be more specific how a lack of communication is ruining your marriage?
Chris: We don’t talk enough.
T: Is there something specific you think you should be talking about that you don’t talk about?
Chris: Lots of stuff.
T: Can you give me an example?
Chris: Stacy gets taken advantage of at work!
T: How so?
Chris: Everyone at work likes Stacy so much, and why not? Stacy helps others when they run into problems and never asks for anything in return. But Stacy gets passed over for promotions.
T: So everyone likes Stacy so much, but Stacy’s boss doesn’t or doesn’t think Stacy’s work rates promotions?
Chris: Stacy doesn’t even apply for promotions!
T: Oh. Not applying is different from being passed over, isn’t it?
Chris: So, why doesn’t Stacy apply?
T: You’re asking me?
Chris: I’m just exasperated. I’m asking the universe.
T: Why are you asking the universe? Stacy is right here.
Chris: {to Stacy} Why don’t you apply?
Stacy: We’ve been over this a million times. You know why.
T: {raises hand} Do I get to know?
Stacy: {exasperated} Because I don’t want to. I love my job. I love the people I work with. I don’t want that to change.
T: {to Chris} Oooh, you want Stacy to get a promotion because it would bring in more money to your household?
Chris: That’s one reason, but it’s not so much about the money. We don’t really need it. I make three times what Stacy makes, and we’re definitely not hurting. Maybe, after a tax hike, it wouldn’t make much difference.
T: {to both} Then what’s this all about?
Chris: I think Stacy should get fair value for Stacy’s work. If nothing else, it would be good for Stacy’s self esteem.
T: {thinking}
T: Let’s hold off on that for now.
T: {to both} You’ve been married for… {checks the intake form}
Chris and Stacy: Seven years.
T: Who wants to tell me how you met?
Stacy: A friend of a friend introduced us.
T: And how did the budding romance happen?
Chris: I had been doing the dating apps thing and was tired of it. I was getting to the point where I wanted to settle down, but with only the right person.
T: What was wrong with the dating apps thing?
Chris: The dating apps matched interests and preferences, but that didn’t translate to I want to be with this person. It was more, this could be a good friend, if that’s what I was looking for. I had enough friends. I was discouraged, I guess.
Stacy: I had just gone a long time between having more than a date or two with the same person. Just didn’t find anyone who I clicked with, until Chris, that is.
T: You clicked because?
Stacy: It was just comfortable. I could be myself.
Chris: Yeah, same.
T: When did you learn that Stacy made a third of what you made?
Chris: It became obvious, early on. Stacy didn’t want to go to fancy restaurants and lived a more modest lifestyle than I did, in general.
T: Did that bother you then?
Chris: I was so happy to be with someone like Stacy, I didn’t give it a thought. And, as I said, if we were going to be together, I make plenty of money.
T: You hadn’t met anyone before who you thought a lot of and also made a lot of money?
Chris: Yeah, but there were other issues. They weren’t interested in a life mate at the time, or maybe I didn’t find them attractive. It’s not easy to find a life partner fit.
T: {joking} Some find it easy enough that they find a life partner multiple times. {no one laughs} I was joking in my way of agreeing with you.
{as the joke hits them, both Chris and Stacy smile}
So, if I understand you, Stacy was your first or best potential life partner. Do you see that differently, now?
Chris: God no!
T: How would you explain your current dissatisfaction of what brought you to see a marraige counselor?
Chris: I don’t want Stacy to change. I just want Stacy to value what Stacy contributes at work and be promoted.
T: And you don’t see that as Stacy changing?
{quiet}
T: Can you explain in more detail what you fell for in Stacy?
Chris: Stacy was … is just kinder, more thoughtful, and more fun, than anyone else I’ve met. Stacy’s got a bunch of friends who adore Stacy, and I can see why. Stacy is good with kids—I hope we’ll have kids eventually—and is just a great person.
T: Why do you think Stacy doesn’t apply for promotions?
Chris: I think Stacy’s afraid of being turned down—doesn’t want to put Stacy’s accomplishments on the line for potential criticism.
T: And you’ve asked Stacy, and this is what Stacy tells you?
Chris: Stacy just shrugs and says, “I dunno, I guess I like my job.”
T: And you don’t believe Stacy? Why don’t you ask Stacy right now.
Chris: Why don’t you apply for promotions?
Stacy: {quiet for a couple of minutes}
T: What’s keeping you from answering?
Stacy: Chris will think it’s dumb.
T: What makes you think that?
Stacy: Because maybe it is. I dunno. I tell Chris, I like my job, and that doesn’t seem to mean anything to Chris.
T: Maybe if you elaborated.
Stacy: I like the work I do. I like the people I work with. I like my boss, who gives me complete latitude. I like the office building, the coffee vendor down below, the exercise club next door. If I was promoted, I have no idea where I’d have to work, who my boss would be, who my co-workers would be. I would have more responsibility, but not the kind of responsibility that I’d like, which is working independently. I don’t want to supervise subordinates. I’d bring in a little more money, but after the effect on our taxes, it wouldn’t be much more, and as Chris says, we don’t really need it. So if I applied for a promotion merely to satisfy my ego, and got a position I liked a whole lot less, how would that better my life. And if I made my life worse to satisfy Chris, I’d probably be resentful, and how would that make our marriage better?
{quiet}
Chris: I don’t know what I was thinking. I assumed that what I would like for my career would be what you would like for yours. Obviously, that’s not true.
T: And Stacy would be a different person if Stacy got a job Stacy didn’t want. And you may not like that new version as much as the old version.
Chris: {thoughtful} Probably not.
People aren’t fixer-uppers. Be wary of going into a relationship that you believe will be just one change away in your mate that will make the relationship work. You probably won’t be successful in facilitating that change, or if you are, your mate won’t be the same in all the ways you liked beforehand.
Recursion in Therapy
(For the sole purpose of amusing myself, I gave my website a title.)
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates
Get over yourself.
—Thousands of people who aren’t Socrates
Because my wife keeps asking me to define recursion, which is tricky because it’s originally a mathematical concept, then borrowed by computer programmers, and eventually, by scientists.
Recursion is a different way of looking at the feedback loop. An abundance of carbon monoxide is feedback that the body needs to take a fresh breath. A recursive explanation considers that the whole body has been updated to its present state that includes the abundance of carbon monoxide in the lungs. The effect is the same but it’s a description of how the whole body updates rather than just looking at a change in a part of the body. A focus on a single change ignores the changes that are conditioned on taking that breath, in this case the other bodily functions and changes in the consequences that are dependent on oxygen (such as remaining alive). Change in a living being is not a single change while the rest remains exactly as before.
Below, I describe each change in the client as the whole of the client being the feedback for the therapist. The following is a caricature, that is, not based on a particular client and I attempt to give only the flavor of sessions. Think of the collection as an interview with all the “ums” and “you knows" deleted.
T: What brings you here?
C: I’m afraid to go outside.
T: How did you get to my office?
C: I drove.
T: You have a garage where you have your car, and can enter your car without going outside?
C: No, my car is at the curb.
T: So you walked to your car on the street and got in and drove?
C: Yes.
T: So you do go outside on occasion.
C: I guess so.
T: On what other recent occasions have you gone outside?
C: I needed groceries, so I went to the store.
T: There’s no one at home to get the groceries?
C: I live alone.
T: So you go outside when you absolutely have to?
C: I guess so.
T: On what other recent occasions have you had to go outside?
C: I work. I have to go to an office.
T: Like five days a week?
C: Yeah.
T: So, you’re afraid to go outside, but you do go outside?
C: I guess so.
T: You go outside regularly, in fact.
C: Yeah.
T: So you’re afraid, but you face your fears by necessity.
C: Yeah.
The client entered the office as someone who identified as afraid to go outside, but now identifies as afraid to go outside but does so when necessary. He is a slightly different person than when he entered.
T: You live alone. Do you have friends or family who visit you?
C: I don’t have friends. I have a sister who visits about once a month and brings her toddler.
T: You work in an office as what?
C: I’m an accountant.
T: How many people work in your office?
C: Maybe 20 or so. Six CPAs, the rest support staff.
T: Half are men, half are women or…?
C: Umm… probably about right; I don’t count them, offhand.
T: I assume you talk to your fellow workers, as needed.
C: Of course.
T: How about, besides as needed? Like, in the break room where you might say, “Did you watch that comedy about accountants?”
C: Not much [shrug].
T: Because you’re shy?
C: Yeah.
[Quiet for a couple of minutes…]
T: Do you have neighbors?
C: Yeah.
T: You talk to them ever?
C: We nod.
T: They’re shy too, or not friendly?
C: No they’re friendly. Guess they gave up.
T: Trying to strike up a conversation?
C: [shrug]
T: When you say you’re afraid of going outside, is it outside or worried about running into people?
C: Little of both, I guess.
The client now identifies as someone who is afraid of running into other people, perhaps more than being afraid of going outside. He is a slightly different person than when he entered.
T: You say you don’t have friends. Did you have friends when you were younger? In college? Or before that, in school?
C: I had one friend. He moved away when I was eleven.
T: How long was he your friend?
C: About five years.
T: And no friends since. What was it about him that you could be friends with and no one since?
C: Well, I guess we met before being cool was a thing and just liked doing stuff together.
T: Such as?
C: At first, just playing with toys together; mostly just hanging out at each other’s house, having snacks, and playing video games.
T: Before being cool; you didn’t have to pretend to be different from how you felt.
C: Yeah.
Session 2:
T: Anything different for you this week?
C: I waved to my neighbor.
T: Did the neighbor respond?
C: Yeah; took him a few seconds, then he waved back.
C: {laughs} Guess he was surprised.
T: Could be. That’s cool; anything else different this week?
C: I sat in the break room for a few minutes while drinking my coffee.
T: Did anyone come in?
C: Yeah, a couple of people. They said, “Hey.” I said, “Hey.”
Unlike, many therapists I don’t respond to these answers with, “How did that make you feel?” My bent is not to make explicit commentary on feelings because it reinforces focus on oneself, which shy people have more than a sufficient supply. An abundance of focus on oneself is a remnant of adolescence and its accompanying anxiety. Developing a habit of outward focus, curiosity about others, is a better strategy for shy people (and for most people).
Yet, again, the client is a slightly different person from who he was when he first came to see me and after the initial session. He’s no longer someone who’s afraid to go outside. He’s now someone who is experimenting with social interaction.
Session 3:
T: Anything different for you this week?
C: I walked around the block, as you suggested
T: [waiting]
C: I waived at someone mowing the lawn.
T: [waiting]
C: He just looked at me, then went back to his mowing.
T: [waiting]
C: I felt like an idiot.
T: You have a theory about why he didn’t respond to your wave?
C: Only idiots wave to a stranger.
T: Your one theory was he thought you were an idiot for waving at him? Did you have any other theories?
C: What do you mean?
T: Did you have any other theories why he might not have returned your wave with a wave or some such?
C: No.
T: Can you think of any now?
C: Um…
T: Can you think of any theories why he might not have returned your wave with a wave or some such that had nothing to do with you?
C: Oh…um… argument with his wife?
T: Or?
C: Guess there can be a lot of reasons…
T: …that had nothing to do with you.
C: Yeah.
The client entered the office as someone who identified as afraid to go outside, then identified as afraid to go outside but does so when necessary. He entered the latest session, miffed that my suggestion that he walk around the block resulted in him feeling like an idiot when his greeting gesture was ignored. (When you have few interactions with others, each interaction takes on great significance.) However, he’s now a person who is slightly less self conscious. He is a slightly different person than when he entered the first, second, and third sessions. This presentation of a slightly different person is recursive feedback for the therapist.
Session 4:
T: Anything different for you this last week?
C: You always ask me the same thing.
T: I guess I do.
T: [waiting]
T: Is there something you’d like me to ask you instead?
C: I dunno, seems you could be more creative.
T: Maybe I’m not that creative, but I’m open to suggestions.
C: I’ll think about it and let you know.
T: Ok. Does that mean you don’t want to answer my question—“Anything different for you this last week?"—today?
C:
T: Care to explain, or rather not?
C: I don’t want to, at least, not now.
I don’t know why the client wasn’t in the mood to answer my regular opening gambit. Anything I can come up with is an inference that has less of a chance of being accurate and more of a chance of creating something that wasn’t there until I suggested it into existence.
Session 5:
T: [I’m quiet.]
C: [Snickers] You’re not going to ask me what you always ask me? Did I hurt your feelings?
T: [I chuckle] Maybe a little. Mostly, I’m just trying something different.
I think it’s good he knows he can affect me, that he knows he can affect anyone at all. It’s the opposite of realizing the guy who was mowing his lawn was not personally snubbing the client; that the mower has his own life and is not a character in the client’s life. The client is learning he can affect other people, including me.
Session 6:
C: I thought of something different you could ask me.
T: Cool. [waiting]
C: You could ask me whether I did anything new this week.
T: I see, more specific. Did you do anything new this week?
C: I talked to three people in the break room.
T: How was that for you?
C: It was ok.
T: Anything in particular that was ok?
C: Not really, I guess because nothing bad happened.
T: Nothing that made you regret it like with the guy in the yard.
C: Yeah.
Since my early years as a therapist, I’ve had a theory that the client will nudge the therapist in some way, as needed, in the same spirit that the therapist nudges the client. This is mutual recursion. The therapist is also changing in relationship to the client over the sessions. In other words, the relationship between the therapist and client is the same as any other. The one difference is it’s the therapist’s role to be the change agent. Except, because of the mutually recursive feedback, they become each other’s change agent. The client’s change is specific in that he’s becoming someone who can change the therapist to change him.
Session 7:
T: Did you do anything new this week?
C: [Chuckles] You learn fast.
T: I know, right?
C: Not really, new, I would say. More talking to people in the break room.
T: Anyone in particular?
C: Just whoever came in.
T: Tell me about someone who came into the break room who you talked to. What is the person like?
C: [Puzzled] I dunno know. She’s ok, I guess.
T: Is there anyone who you talked to that you know more about? Are they with someone? Have kids, maybe? Do they like music; any particular kind of music? Or sports? Or whatever? Good dressers or causal?
C: Not really; I don’t know those things.
I’m putting out a couple of suggestions: (1) the way to overcome shyness is to show interest in others (as opposed to focus on oneself), and tips how to specifically show interest in others.
I liked that he had the confidence to tease me at the top of the session. We’re not friends; I get paid to talk to him, to help him in how he wants to be helped. However, a relationship is a relationship. It’s not as different from other relationships as many therapists believe. Yes, there’s “projection” in that a therapist may remind you of a significant figure in your life, for example, a mother, father, sibling, etc., and respond at some level as if you were that figure, but that’s true in all relationships. Therapists needn’t make a big fucking deal out of it by bringing up transference.
To reiterate: unless the therapist lacks the behavioral repertoire to respond to the behavior of another, we are mutually responding to each other. Therapy is recursive in that we are constant changing each other and those changes are feedback to each other.
Session 8:
T: Did you do anything new this week?
C: I learned a couple of things about a co-worker.
T: Did you ask a co-worker questions?
C: No; I just listened to when the person was talking to someone else in the break room.
T: Another way of learning about others. You can observe them.
C: Yeah.
Two ways the client is a different person from when he started therapy: he realized he could learn about others without feeling invasive, and he is less attentive to himself and more attentive to others.