The Top of Your Mind, Part II

30Aug10

In the shower this morning, my top-of-the-mind problem was how to design a mathematical model to express my ideas about discrimination.  Sitting in front of my computer right now, it’s how to explain my ideas about Graham’s article clearly; even when I take a break from writing this, I’m evaluating what I think, read and do in terms of this problem.  Yesterday, on a long car ride, my attention kept wandering to metacognition and the explicitness of game rules.  And that’s not even counting the times that my top-of-mind thinking goes to things that have nothing overt to do with my professional life, like the books I read!

In short, while I think Graham is onto something really important, I think he’s wrong about two big things.  First, I don’t think that shower time (or waiting-in-line time, or long-car-ride time) is the most useful time for ambient thought.  Second, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that most people have only one problem at the top of their minds at any given time.

I think this not just because of my own experience – after all, how representative am I? – but because of things that have come up in an apparently unrelated research study I’m doing.  I’ve been interviewing Ars Magica players about how the game shapes their ideas and feelings about history.  One thing that’s come up in a number of the interviews is that players’ characters become top-of-mind when players are exposed to historical information.  In other words, the characters and their problems serve as a filter for players’ attention to history.

While there are many interesting implications to this finding (which I’ll be unpacking further in my paper on the subject – watch this site!), what it says to me is that top-of-mind-ness is far more context-specific than Graham’s essay implies.  If I have a great conversation about game rule explicitness, I’ll find that at the top of my mind for a day or two.  If that idea then gets reinforced, it’s more likely to show up at top-of-mind when I’ve got no explicit priming information – like in the shower.  If I instead get another strong input, such as sitting down to work on my dissertation, my ambient thoughts are going to move to dissertation-related problems instead.

The problem to which your mind flows in relatively context-free time, therefore, is likely to be one that you get a lot of contextual reinforcement for.  What this means is that the idea you’re thinking about in the shower is an important signal of what contexts you’re spending a lot of time in.  Are you constantly thinking about, say, raising money?  Then the question becomes how often you’re being primed to think about raising money in focused contexts.

What’s cool about this is that it gives us some measure of control over our ambient thought.  A friend who’d read the essay was telling me that he had a hard time getting his mind to wander where he wanted.  What I told him is that, by definition, you can’t control the wandering of your mind!  But you can prime yourself repeatedly with things that make you think about the problem you wish your mind were wandering to.  Not everyone can use a focused effort of will to abandon unproductive lines of thought, but we can all give ourselves lots of exposure to the thing we wish we were engaged with instead.  Even if that’s one minute five times a day, it’ll help your mind go where you want it to, not where it shouldn’t.

Now I’m off to spend some time putting my dissertation back at the top of my mind!

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Tags: attention

The Top of Your Mind, Part I

19Aug10

Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about Paul Graham’s essay, The Top Idea in Your Mind.  He argues for “ambient thought” as a valuable problem-solving tool.  The thing you let your mind drift to when you’re in the shower, or standing in line, or on the subway?  That’s the thing you’re going to have insights about.  What seem like snips and scraps of time add up to a lot of attention on a problem, especially since they’re likely reflecting even more activity going on under the surface.

When it comes to creativity, this is what’s called incubation – time you’re not actively spending on a problem, but that nonetheless helps you solve it.  There’s some debate about how incubation works: does it help you come up with new ideas about a problem, or does it just help you let go of ideas that aren’t working?  Either way, though, that time is valuable.  As Graham points out, you can get unproductive things stuck in the top of your mind, such as raising money or arguments you’ve had.  If you do, you lose out on productive incubation for whatever idea you might have engaged with otherwise.

But are money and arguments really always unproductive?  Can we generalize beyond Paul Graham’s experience?  I think the answer is yes.  What’s common to Graham’s problematic “top ideas” he mentions is inability to control the outcomes.  Raising money is dependent on other people’s willingness to give it to you.  Resolving a dispute is dependent on the participation of whoever you’re in conflict with.  No matter how much time you spend “solving” these problems, they’re not within your power to solve.  Spending top-of-the-mind time on them is like salting your umbrella: it may make you feel like you’re cooking, but at the end of the day, it won’t taste very good no matter what you do.

Graham’s approach to forgiveness is a really good example of how to let go of problems you can’t control, and focus on ones you can.  When you find yourself able to spend your top-of-the-mind time on things you can make progress on, you’ll find that progress actually gets made!

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Tags: attention

Reading List 2010 (5/104)

18Aug10

Still behind!

• Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar …, Thomas Cathcart & Daniel M. Klein
• The Curious Case of  Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Sushi Economy, Sasha Issenberg
• Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, John Gottman
• Alone Together, Paul R. Amato, Alan Booth, David R. Johnson & Stacy J. Rogers

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Tags: books

Unrequited Romance With Media Figures

17Aug10

David Duchovny, why don’t you love me?

Or, if you’re like me and have never seen the X-Files, you could just get it on with Ray Bradbury.  [NSFW]

As funny as these videos are, they’re also wonderful examples of magical thinking about authorship and creativity.  To love the work is to love the man behind the work.  (And of course the reverse happens too.  See under: Olivia Munn.)

I think this would be an interesting concept to look at historically, as ideas of public and private life have changed.  I just read How to Be Alone* which has a wonderful essay on the disappearance of the public sphere, and at the same time new technologies let us perform as if in public all the time.  I’m sure authors and actors have always gotten plenty of mash notes (what a wonderful phrase!), but to me these performances feel different, and I don’t think it’s just because they’re meant to be funny.  I think the funny lies in the exposure of this conflation of author and work, public and private, and the attempt to touch one by rather literally touching the other.

* If this indicates to you that I am way behind with my book logging, you would be absolutely correct.

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Tags: authorship, humor

Your Algorithm Does Not Function Here

10Aug10

On a completely different note, I’m officially making this article required reading for anyone who wants to talk to me about interactive narrative.

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Tags: storytelling

Assumptions, Transgression and Plagiarism

10Aug10

In Stanley Fish’s post on plagiarism, he argues that plagiarism is not a “big moral deal” – a phrase I’m delighted he uses, even if I disagree with parts of his argument.  It deflates the usual hysteria about how terrible it is that kids these days just don’t care about proper attribution of sources because the Internet has ruined their brains.  This is a chance to actually think the issue through.

I think Fish is absolutely right that plagiarism only becomes a transgression against the backdrop of certain assumptions.  However, I think those assumptions are far broader than simply the disciplinary standards of journalism or academia.  In writing something down, there is an implied claim of ownership of the words and ideas.  Referencing the original author then lets the reader know that in this case, that assumption does not hold.  Citation holds additional meaning in particular disciplines, of course, such as allowing the reader to trace the ideas in the piece back to their sources.  Ultimately, though, if we didn’t have widespread cultural assumptions about the meaning of writing something down, we wouldn’t need to signal when those assumptions are violated.

Here’s a thought experiment.  Writing – and by extension authorship – could come with a set of rather different assumptions.  Imagine that everything written down was assumed to be the work of someone else.  If you were to propound your own ideas, it would need to be clearly signaled with a set of written markers, and failure to use those markers correctly could get you in serious trouble. “Kids these days are so arrogant,” one can imagine the hysterical articles claiming.  ”They keep trying to pass their own work off as the work of other, smarter, more talented people.  They just don’t care about properly marking what’s their own.”  This isn’t even so terribly unrealistic; the documentary hypothesis suggests precisely this sort of reverse plagiarism, just for example.  (I remember hearing a similar argument made about Shakespeare’s positioning some of his dramatic innovations as traditional, but damned if I can find it again.  Anyone know?)

This is why I disagree with Fish.  The disciplinary values that he frames as “game rules” are not value neutral.  (Just ask Ian Bogost about the way rules can express particular critical positions!)  They are founded on a commonly understood meaning of what writing means, which itself ties to the notions of originality and single authorship that Fish tries to take out of the picture.  Saying that plagiarism is wrong because it violates the rules of the academic game is fine, but that only refers the issue to the assumptions on which the rules themselves are founded.  Will those rules change as our assumptions about written texts change?  Will they stay the same, becoming a hermetically sealed system?  Or will they serve as a brake on how our ideas shift, tying us back to individualism and changing our practices themselves?

It also bothers me that originality and single authorship are assumed to go together, and that if one doesn’t exist, it violates the other.  This assumption is by far my biggest problem with the paper.  People can be profoundly creative working in groups.  While it’s hard to assign a standard notion of authorship to any individual within the group, it hardly implies that just anyone can claim to have contributed, or that nothing new has been created.  In fact, one can look at the entire process of academic citation and referencing as a way of collaboratively producing original knowledge.  Each person working in a particular academic tradition has their own ideas, but they’re based on relationships and prior ideas.  The citation process is precisely a system to formalize and make visible this group relationship, in the interests of allowing one person to claim authorship of a single portion of the conversation.

Of course, these ideas about originality and single authorship are ones Fish reports on, not claims as his own.  I just wish he’d cited his sources more extensively, so I could respond to the people actually making this argument rather than Fish’s interpretation of their work!

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Tags: authorship, originality, plagiarism

Reading List 2010 (7/99)

06Aug10

More books!  (And musings on creativity, below the cut.)

• Gone Tomorrow, Lee Child
• Relentless, Dean Koontz
• Undone, Karin Slaughter
• The Reapers, John Connolly
• The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
• Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
• The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, Evelyn Waugh

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Tags: books

The Last Refuge of the Bigot

05Aug10

From the MIT report on women science faculty:

Each generation of young women, including those who are currently senior faculty, began by believing that gender discrimination was “solved” in the previous generation and would not touch them. Gradually however, their eyes were opened to the realization that the playing field is not level after all, and that they had paid a high price both personally and professionally as a result.

And:

Once and for all we must recognize that the heart and soul of discrimination, the last refuge of the bigot, is to say that those who are discriminated against deserve it because they are less good.

In my research on racism and sexism, I encounter many, many, many people who want to say the problem of discrimination is solved.  Consequently, if we’re still seeing unequal opportunities for women and people of color, it means there must be something wrong with them.  My dissertation work looks at how to change exactly these ideas, which means I struggle with when to engage and when to walk away from the inevitable Stupid Internet Arguments.

Books like Microaggressions in Everyday Life, Racism Without Racists and The Mismeasure of Woman do a wonderful job of shredding these approaches and showing the harm they do, but I can’t pull out a book-length argument every time these issues come up.  As my brother pointed out, I need an elevator pitch for what I’m working on, or no one’s going to listen to me but other academics.  I think I’ve found mine in this report, or at least a direction for shaping one.

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Tags: discrimination, gender, racism

Reading List 2010 (20/92)

30Jul10

Oh, Shannara!

I discovered Shannara young; it reminds me of endless Saturday afternoons sprawled across my bed, reading in a shaft of dusty sunlight until the dusk came down and my mother called me for dinner.  Still, I’m a bit embarrassed that I just read all twenty (twenty! when did that happen?) books in the series.  Brooks does a great job of dramatic action sequences, and I like the way he connects his fantasy world to the one we know, but ultimately, these are candy.

If you’re actually curious about the list, you can see it below the cut.

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Tags: books

Finding My Line

28Jul10

Over the last two months I’ve been working intensely on my dissertation.  If you’re wondering whether this relates to my adviser’s imminent return from sabbatical, you’d be right!  But I’ve been really surprised by how much this intense focus helps both my productivity and my mood.  I wake up every morning raring to dissertate (yes, I did just say “raring to dissertate”), and I still have several hours to devote to other projects after I hit my daily targets.

Today, I came across Merlin Mann’s article on Making Time to Make and realized what I’ve been doing.  I’ve been drawing a clear and firm line around my time.  While I hardly have the problems of a Neal Stephenson, I do have lots of people who want my time: academic colleagues, former students, potential consulting clients, friends I haven’t seen recently, and more.  All these relationships enrich my life, but there’s more of them than I can manage!  Worse, making daily decisions about how much attention I could spare was killing my productivity even when I wasn’t actually available.

I’ve made a few exceptions, but my so-far-successful ruleset looks like this:

- No meetings that end after 10am, unless data collection requires it.
- No leaving the office for any reason until I’ve hit my dissertation goal for the day.
- No new freelance projects or academic commitments.*
- No organizing social events of any kind; let other people be in charge!
- No long emails.  (And a private IM account that only my boy’s got access to.)
- No apologizing for putting my dissertation first.

What’s especially interesting to me is just how much of this was made possible by the dissertation-completion fellowship program I’m in.  The office they gave me is hidden away**, meaning I don’t get interrupted unexpectedly.  The workspace is ergonomic enough that I can work until I’ve hit my daily goal without killing my wrists.  The meeting room is heavily booked during the late morning and afternoon, so I’m not tempted to schedule midday meetings.  It’s amazing how these structural changes help me enforce my own rules!

That’s not to say that line-drawing has no drawbacks.  There are people I really like who aren’t getting the attention I want to give them, and I’m feeling pretty darn broke without any new projects in the pipeline.  Just yesterday I had to tell a former student I couldn’t meet with him, which I hate to do!  And there are less obvious drawbacks, too: I’m not really good at letting other people organize my free time, so instead of hanging out with friends I’m doing more one-on-one activities with the boy.***

I think that some of the specifics of my strategy will have to change during the upcoming year. For example, I’d like to have one “open afternoon” a week, where I go work somewhere I’m casually available for conversation and brainstorming.  I also don’t think I can go a whole year without organizing any social events!  But having rules, even if they’re less strict, seems to work really well for me.  The less time I spend making decisions about how to spend my time, the more time I actually have to spend.****

* Okay, I’m really bad at this one.  Why must so many things be so interesting?

** In a basement, as usual.  Do you think I can write “Must have workspace with window” into a job contract?

*** Though this isn’t all bad, since it’s resulted in dance lessons!

**** Which is why I may have to do a piece about rules as cognitive technology.  But not now!  My rules say I can’t!

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Tags: dissertation, productivity