Summary: This post explores how ‘who we are’ determines ‘what we experience’.

“If you don’t like someone, the way he holds his spoon will make you furious; if you do like him, he can turn his plate over into your lap and you won’t mind.” - Irving Becker.

I am not a fair person.

I notice this regularly in my interactions with people. When I’m frustrated with someone—say, for not responding quickly enough to my every whim—I filter all of my encounters with that person through the lens of that frustration. On the other hand, if someone has a reputation in my books of being really on the ball, I give them large amounts of latitude.

So if Person A, who responds slowly, takes an hour to answer a phone message, I become enraged. “She’s never around! It’s impossible to get a hold of her!” Whereas when Person B, who responds quickly, takes the same hour, I’m impressed with the prompt reaction.

In other words, my reaction is not about the event; it’s about my own feelings towards the other person.

I’ve been noticing this tendency with particular frequency in the presidential campaign. Every action taken by a candidate I don’t like is judged, by me, with swift harshness: “What a stupid thing to say! Unbelievable.” Every blunder by a candidate I like is forgiven immediately: “Well, we all say silly things sometimes.”

What are the practical implications of this phenomenon? The most important one is awareness. I might be massively biased, but knowing that I’m biased gives me the leeway to question my own responses.

Another important byproduct is in how we engage with others, and why our reputations are so vitally, critically important. If you have a good reputation, you can be forgiven a whole lot, but if you have a bad reputation, the easiest sell will be an uphill battle.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes a tool people can use to measure how strongly they associate two things; the example in the book is about racism (how strongly you associate black people with negative words). A friend of mine forwarded a watered-down version that measures feelings towards the presidential candidates. Take a few minutes and play—it’s well worth the time—and then let me know how you go in the comments.

“We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.” - Anais Nin

This concept is also the foundation behind the VortexDNA philosophy. Who we are is what determines our experience. Who we are is what decides how our lives unfold. Who we are is not only the most important variable in what we become, but also the variable over which we exert the greatest degree of control.

Who are you?

Summary: This is a reprint of my Search Insider column from last Friday.

Chris Morrison at VentureBeat has been one of the privileged few to get a sneak preview of Powerset; he recently reported that the semantic start-up’s unofficial tagline is, “We’re not a search engine.”

According to Morrison, this is standard for any company looking to dodge the hype of the ‘Google-killer’ moniker — fair enough; although, based on Powerset’s behavior to date, they don’t seem inclined to dodge hype of any variety.

There’s another reason for Powerset and its ilk to shun the search engine label, though: search isn’t broken.
Remember Gord’s Breaking the Google Habit series? Over five of his Search Insider columns, he discussed how people form habits and what it takes to change. We got a more scientific understanding of what we knew instinctively already: habits are darn hard to break, even if you want to break them.

Take overeating. Despite pills and patches and pop psychology, millions are locked in a seemingly unbreakable cycle — and that’s something that people want to give up. That’s something that goes to the heart of people’s senses of self-esteem and wellbeing, something that can extend or diminish life expectancy.

There’s no equivalent downside for using Google, which means that merely offering a slightly better version doesn’t represent a convincing argument. Nobody is going to change search engines because the top 10 results are slightly more relevant.

So those companies looking to compete have to take a different approach: the we’re-not-a-search-engine approach. This is the approach demanded of disruptive technologies since the beginning of time. Don’t offer a faster horse, build a car.

The road to success requires would-be Google-killers to solve a problem that Google doesn’t solve, to create a new habit under a new circumstance, where it can flourish free from the inexorable pull of ingrained attitudes.

This is why David Berkowitz reported last September that MySpace was the fourth largest search engine: because they’re competing in a different arena.

Twine is another great example; it represents a totally new way of interacting with data. You can create a habit of using Twine without threatening your Google use, transitioning slowly and imperceptibly until you wake up one day and say, “Remember when we all thought Google couldn’t be beaten?”

This is also why it’s so important for Google to snap up a token presence in every emerging Web 2.0-3.0-4.0 space. They know that they’re unlikely to be threatened on their own turf, and they want to make sure they’re at least in the ring wherever the fight’s going to be.

The great philosopher Osho said, “If you want to do something with darkness, you have to do something with light, not with darkness at all. You have to light a candle, and suddenly there is no darkness.” I’m not suggesting that Google represents the Forces of Evil here, but the concept is transferable: light the candle of a new habit, and the old habit disappears.

Will Powerset be the candle of a new habit? That remains to be seen. Ultimately, though, someone will be the candle; as Osho also said, “Habits die hard. But they die certainly — if one persists, they die.”

As you might imagine, I was an avid reader as a kid—still am, of course. One of my favorite books was about an eleven-year-old boy, Will, who learns that he’s one of the Old Ones and has to fight the Dark to save the Earth. I’ve thought about this book many times over the years, but its title and author had completely escaped my memory until recently, when I mentioned the story to my friend Steve.

“Oh, that’s The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper,” he said immediately. Delight! Rapture!

Then he went me one better. A few weeks later, we met for lunch, and he brought me a copy of the entire Dark Is Rising series! Oh, frabjous day!

So I’ve been journeying back to my childhood via Will Stanton and the eternal battle between Light and Dark. If that weren’t bliss enough, it turns out that there are five books in the series—and I had only read the first two. A trip down Memory Lane and a new adventure! Life doesn’t get much better than this. Incidentally, Will’s story was turned into a perhaps not-so-good movie just last year.

The Dark is Rising is classic good vs. evil, in which Will must fulfill his destiny as the last of the Old Ones. His destiny is a good one, but not all destinies are. Consider this quote from Dr. Robert Green, professor of neurology, genetics and epidemiology at Boston University School of Medicine (hat tip: Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei):

Genetic information has a special power. It has a feel of fate about it, a sense of inevitability, that sense that, “Oh, you are marked.”

Of course you could be marked for something good or for something bad, but what we seek in genetic information is usually the bad: Do I have a propensity for obesity? Cancer? Heart disease? The lack of these markers isn’t cause for celebration, but their presence is cause for despair.

I don’t know whether destiny exists. I have two astrologer friends who tend to be pretty accurate with their insights and predictions, so maybe it does. Nonetheless, I urge you:

Strive to excel regardless of whether or not you believe it is your destiny.

Wouldn’t you always want to do your best, even if your life was predetermined? Let’s say you’re genetically programmed to never win a gold medal at the Olympics. Wouldn’t you still benefit from training to your peak? Let’s say it’s your destiny to get heart disease. Shouldn’t you still eat well and exercise?

Looking to destiny is one thing; relying on it, in the absence of your own positive action, is another thing altogether.

My brilliant friend Shana once described how she met a fella she’d been dating: “I put a clarion call out to the universe that I was ready to be with a really great guy, and then I took the action steps to make it happen.”

I loved that. There are lots of people who understand the first half of that equation, but it’s the totality of the statement that makes the difference. That’s why I love the epigenetics story: that your environment, including your beliefs, determine whether your genes get switched on or off. In Dr. Green’s parlance, your environment and beliefs drive the inevitable outcome of your life.

Don’t worry about whether or not something is your destiny. Just take the action steps. Even if you don’t achieve your original goal, I promise you that you will be more satisfied than if you had done nothing.

What are your thoughts on destiny?

The visionary is the person who sees potential rather than problems. The person who says, over and over again in response to myriad objections and projections of doom, “But that’s not the point!” The person who gets the importance of newspapers even when there’s no market for them, no means of producing them, and no reliable channels of distribution.

The visionary makes complex things simple and believes the vision is more important than the immediate. She makes quantum leaps—rather than proceeding from A to B, she goes from A to F in the quiet confidence that surely somebody, somewhere, will take care of B, C, D, and E.

It is the man who says “A computer on every desk and in every home,” knowing full well that, in order for that to happen, technology has to improve, prices have to drop, demand has to be created, sales infrastructures have to grow, and consumers have to acquire new skills.

He understands not only his own arena but those surrounding it: the long-term effects of massive socioeconomic shifts caused by phenomena such as deregulation and privatization, and the opportunities created by them.

She spends a lot of time extrapolating multiple threads of possibility: “So if this happens, this should be the result, which would likely cause this…” She also spends a lot of time working backwards, in order to understand what has to happen if the vision is to be realized—and she doesn’t reject where these roads lead even if they seem improbable or intimidating.

A man whose vision, for example, is a completely consistent french fry doesn’t flinch when he realizes what he has to do to make it happen; he simply gets on with the job of changing the entire potato-growing industry to produce more uniform potatoes.

She will often be one of many working on a similar problem—like lightbulbs or motorcars—but she will bring to it a unique perspective that changes everything. The fact that there are many people working on a problem means only that it is a problem worth solving.

Visionaries are often wrong, but they get better over time because of the mere fact that they are paying attention. They are also shunned, mocked, ridiculed, and divorced, and if they don’t have the obsessive single-mindedness that leads all these things to happen, it is unlikely that their visions will ever be realized. The 1% of the story that happens at the end is what makes the difference between a visionary and a failure, and many people don’t wait long enough to find out.

I suspect that it is a far happier thing to read about a visionary than to be one.

What about you?

Nova Spivack, of Twine fame, has come out with an interesting blog post questioning whether our ‘junk’ DNA (the 97% of our DNA that doesn’t code for amino acids) could be a more effective storage mechanism for communal knowledge than Wikipedia:

There is of course one other place to store knowledge which may be even better than the Wikipedia — and that is DNA. By storing knowledge in human DNA of living humans, or of common bacteria for that matter, it could then potentially be passed down and spread through generations into the far future. However the mutability of DNA over time might gradually introduce errors that would degrade the information within particular lines of DNA over long periods of time.

Perhaps this could however be mitigated by comparing DNA samples from a large cross-section of individuals within the population of descendants of original holders of DNA-knowledge-archives in the future — this would effectively enable statistical error cancellation. The farther in the future from the date at which the knowledge is “written” to the DNA of some number of humans, the more people’s DNA would be needed to eliminate the errors statistically. This would however in principle counteract mutations and enable the reliable recovery of messages in DNA even very far in the future.

Interestingly, the problem that he posits here and his proposed solution mirror the wiki process itself: by gathering data from everyone, errors are likely to occur, but by normalizing across a large sample, those errors should be minimized if not eliminated.

Spivack goes on to cite an article by Karl Kruszelnicki about a language that possibly already exists in our DNA:

According to the linguists, all human languages obey Zipf’s Law. It’s a really weird law, but it’s not that hard to understand. Start off by getting a big fat book. Then, count the number of times each word appears in that book. You might find that the number one most popular word is “the” (which appears 2,000 times), followed by the second most popular word “a” (which appears 1,800 times), and so on. Right down at the bottom of the list, you have the least popular word, which might be “elephant”, and which appears just once.

Set up two columns of numbers. One column is the order of popularity of the words, running from “1″ for “the”, and “2″ for “a”, right down “1,000″ for “elephant”. The other column counts how many times each word appeared, starting off with 2,000 appearances of “the”, then 1,800 appearances of “a”, down to one appearance of “elephant”.

If you then plot on the right kind of graph paper, the order of popularity of the words, against the number of times each word appears you get a straight line! Even more amazingly, this straight line appears for every human language - whether it’s English or Egyptian, Eskimo or Chinese! Now the DNA is just one continuous ladder of squillions of rungs, and is not neatly broken up into individual words (like a book).

So the scientists looked at a very long bit of DNA, and made artificial words by breaking up the DNA into “words” each 3 rungs long. And then they tried it again for “words” 4 rungs long, 5 rungs long, and so on up to 8 rungs long. They then analysed all these words, and to their surprise, they got the same sort of Zipf Law/straight-line-graph for the human DNA (which is mostly introns), as they did for the human languages!

There seems to be some sort of language buried in the so-called junk DNA! Certainly, the next few years will be a very good time to make a career change into the field of genetics.

Incidentally, this type of analysis is what generates most great discoveries: somebody looking at two things that have never before been connected to each other and saying, “Hey, there’s a pattern here!”

Spivack goes on to suggest that all we need is a way of writing to the DNA and we’re sweet (assuming we also have a way to read it).

Wouldn’t it be great? Imagine you’re the first person encoded—you’d be unstoppable at pub quizzes. You’d make millions on Jeopardy! and 1 vs. 100. You’d be totally insufferable (nobody likes a literal know-it-all), but at least you’d be rich.

Unfortunately, there’s an issue. Not with the idea that societal knowledge can be carried within us—that already exists. How else do salmon know where to go? No, it’s more the idea of our ability to mechanically control this process that pulls me up short.

Mainly, the problem is that there’s no single-source option for DNA. If somebody updates Wikipedia, we all see the updated version, but with DNA, you’d have to have an intimidatingly active sex life to make sure new information is properly distributed.

And how do you handle the question of version control? It would be worse than figuring out whether you qualify as a Native American. “Well, my great-great-grandmother was first infected with knowledge in 2014, so my batch is more recent than yours…” What a mess.

Sorry, Nova, I think we’ve got a ways to go before your idea can be made a reality. I will say this, though, if you can make the semantic web happen, I’ll back you for wikiDNA as well.

(hat tip: Brian Hayes)

“Did you hear? Vitamins are bad for you now.” This pronouncement, delivered by one of my officemates at lunch today, was greeted by nods of understanding. “Everything’s bad for you,” said one. “Life. A sexually transmitted terminal disease,” said another.

“The problem isn’t that things are bad for you,” Maria pointed out. “The problem is how much you worry. The people taking heaps of vitamins are the ones who are really worried about their health, so no wonder it’s coming up that they’re unhealthy.”

“Yeah,” added Brian. “Like that study, where Alzheimer’s patients who had cancer lived way longer than they were supposed to because they kept forgetting they had cancer.”

What a great story! Alzheimer’s as the cure to terminal cancer. I’ve Googled it, of course, with a variety of terms (whoever’s monitoring my online activities is surely wondering about my ‘cancer alzheimer’s life expectancy forget live longer’ Long Tail queries); I did a reasonably detailed search on the Journal of the American Medical Association; nothing.

Have you heard about this study? Can you help me find it?

Aside from being a generally interesting story, this topic is along the lines of some thoughts I’ve been having lately about the mind-body connection, or lack thereof. More specifically, I’ve been wondering why some beliefs are so easy to swallow, while others that would seem to fit in the same category are tantamount to heresy.

Take for example the concept that your thoughts affect your physical body:

ACCEPTABLE: Fear causes your body to produce adrenalin.

NOT ACCEPTABLE: Emotion affects health.

ACCEPTABLE: Vibrations in the form of radio waves or microwaves can transport music and heat food.

NOT ACCEPTABLE: Vibrations in the form of our thoughts have an effect on the world around us.

These are gross generalizations, of course, and I’m not trying to argue science here; what I’m really interested in is what we find palatable. When we hear about some studies, we say, “Oh, how interesting!” while when we hear about others, we say, “Well, surely it can’t be true.” Why the difference?

On another note, I’m going to be cutting back on my blogging frequency, from a post every business day to 2-3 posts per week. Will you let me know what you think about that? Do you want more, less, different?