Category: Mentality

How we think about the way we think about things.

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Cookies, Bodybuilding, and Tinkering: Where the Evidence Can’t Take You

Did Edison have a peer reviewed study supporting the techniques he was using to create the first lightbulb?

Similarly, did the first person to ever bake a cookie already have a recipe for it?

The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe Ever - JoyFoodSunshine
(Image Source)

Imagine being the person that did bake the first cookie. It would be amazing – by some stroke of luck, you’ve happened upon something entirely new and delicious! Imagine being proud of this accomplishment and taking the cookie to one of your friends for them to try it.

They take a bite and say, “Wow, that’s interesting, I haven’t had anything like this before. That tastes really good. What’s the recipe?”

And you respond, “There’s no recipe, I was just trying stuff out.”

“Oh, there’s no recipe?” They frown slightly.

“No, there’s no recipe… I was just trying things out, and this was one of the results,” you say, a bit confused. “I’ll keep trying to make it better and then eventually there might be a recipe, but this is where it is right now, and I think it’s very good so far.”

“Hm. I’m sorry, I’ll admit it – this thing tastes pretty good, but I only eat things that have recipes,” they say matter-of-factly, crossing their arms. “No matter how good it tastes, if it doesn’t have a recipe, it’s not good enough to eat.”

You walk away, completely baffled. How weird was that? Do you think that exchange ever would have happened? Of course not. The insistence of your friend on having a recipe (evidence) in order to validate your results – and consider them legitimate – makes absolutely no sense. If you were to write a recipe, that could only ever occur after you’ve successfully baked the dang thing. The first ever cookie was certainly not the result of rigorous scientific evidence. It was probably a somewhat serendipitous outcome that came about from someone who was playing around with an assortment of possibilities. Thus, the discovery of the cookie (among many other things) and the subsequent recipe-writing that presumably took place were most likely the result of tinkering.

Author, philosopher, and investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “Stochastic Tinkering,” and it’s one of the most powerful concepts I’ve come across when thinking about how innovation and new ideas are formed, especially in the context of our current obsession with being evidence-based. (Note: I am not anti-scientific evidence. I am simply anti-false dichotomy. More on this later.)

Book Nassim Nicholas Taleb for Speaking, Events and Appearances | APB Speakers
Nassim Nicholas Taleb – the man himself. (Image Source)

Put most simply, tinkering can be boiled down to discovering the “best fit” solution or idea as the product of two elements: (1) some degree of randomness over time and (2) perceiving whatever new or surprising changes occur as a result of this randomness.

On a personal scale, this amounts to running small experiments over a period of time – maybe manipulating a few factors here and there – and observing what ends up being beneficial in dealing with the randomness of the world. We can then use these new or surprising changes to continue tinkering and make further observations. This process can be repeated until a desired conclusion is reached, but the caveat here is that you must be comfortable not knowing what kind of conclusion might be reached. You may have an endpoint in mind, but a true tinkerer knows that it may manifest in a totally different way than what they had envisioned.

Now, what’s interesting from my own observations is that it’s almost exclusively the case that the established evidence (e.g. studies) follows the tinkering – not the other way around. The former ends up substantiating the latter, not somehow canceling it out, as some seem to think it does.

Eugen Sandow - Wikipedia
Eugen Sandow. (Image from Wikipedia)

The history of bodybuilding, starting with Eugen Sandow (often credited as the father of modern bodybuilding) is another perfect example of successful tinkering leading to the establishment of evidence. To answer the question “What is the best way to build muscle?” in a time before scientific rigor, people just tried different things, sometimes by accident. There’s the element of randomness. Then, when someone happened upon something that worked – a new or surprising development discovered by Sandow, evidenced by his strength and musculature – people flocked to it, and wanted to learn his techniques. And plenty of people were able to gain muscle and strength by doing so.

Nowadays, because of the impetus issuing from continuously established anecdotal evidence (i.e. we became interested in studying it precisely because people were making gains in strength and muscle for decades with no studies to back anything up), we have a plethora of mechanistic studies, controlled trials, and meta-analyses delineating which training, nutrition, and recovery techniques are best for gaining muscle and strength. There is nothing wrong with this explosion of scientific data, per se. Again, I only implore you to observe the order in which these events took place, and the implications of this order for the current medical/academic obsession with being purely “evidence-based.”

One such meta-analysis.

Did the lack of research in Sandow’s time invalidate all the results gained before the research existed? Of course not. That wouldn’t make any sense, in the same way that not having a recipe for the first ever cookie didn’t invalidate its flavor. However, now that so many of us have given scientific studies unequivocal primacy, people believe anything unsubstantiated by current research to be inherently untenable. In having this belief, we run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Think about this: if it weren’t for forward-thinking people tinkering with new ideas and concepts outside of the established evidence, then we would never have any innovation at all.

It may seem that this concept introduces a science vs. tinkering dichotomy. However, I can assure you this is a false dichotomy. In a way, tinkering is scientific, as it can be used for a sort of fluid hypothesis testing, but it just doesn’t require controlled trials for you to observe the effects. This lowers the scientific rigor in a sense, but individuals need to ask themselves just how important scientific rigor is when applying things to their own lives. You don’t really need a controlled trial to decide that you feel better, look better, perform better, etc. You just need your own experience. And just like research doesn’t invalidate experience, your experience doesn’t invalidate research, either. Although many people treat them as if they are at odds, they are not – nor do they have to be.

If there is tension between what has been established in the literature and your personal results, then there is something to be explored and learned there.

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Who Are You? Confronting Consciousness and Dissolving the Ego

Read time: ~7 minutes

Why I wrote this: Although I’m (extremely) far from being a contemplative master or meditation guru, I wanted to share some of the important insights I have gleaned from starting a mindfulness meditation practice using lessons and theory from Sam Harris’s Waking Up app. Specifically, I wanted to share about the relationship between consciousness and the ego, and also how we might think about ourselves in this context.

To tackle the big topics of ego and consciousness, we’ll start with a mental experiment. Actually, this whole article will be a series of mental experiments, but we’ll start with this one. Think about who you are for just a second. What comes to mind? Maybe you think of your physical appearance. Maybe you think of experiences you’ve had, either recently or long ago. Maybe you think of something that you consider a core pillar of your being – a virtue, belief, or practice.

I imagine that most people would think of some combination of these things I’ve listed, since they are some of the main components of what makes you “you.” Right? At least, it certainly seems that way. However, I want you to think about this:

If it weren’t for your ability to recall these things, who would you be?

We won’t answer this question just yet, but it appropriately sets the stage for a discussion of ego. If I were to put it in a simple (if not slightly reductive) way, your ego is the carefully self-constructed image of who you are. It has been undergoing constant construction for your entire life, most likely without you noticing. So, all of those things I listed earlier as being the components of what makes you “you” could be more accurately termed the components of what makes your ego “your” ego. Having an ego can be useful – it allows us to feel that we are a distinct “self”; it gives us a sense of continuity of self; and it permits us a defense of our behaviors and attitudes by saying “That’s just who I am.”

To put it another way, your ego is the story of who you are that you are continually telling yourself. And, just like many other stories, although it can be used to serve and motivate us, it does not represent reality in this present moment.

In these ways, the ego makes it convenient to navigate everyday occurrences and interactions, because it gives us a sort of baseline definition of “who we are,” and therefore, how we should think and act. The first thing I’d like to point out about this is that merely possessing an ego is not some sort of transgression. We all have one. The second thing I’d like to point out is that, although there’s nothing wrong with having an ego, overidentification with the ego leads to unnecessary psychological suffering (e.g. social anxiety) and/or unhealthy character traits (e.g. hubris) due to the constant need to uphold a mental construct of self. The last thing I’d like to point out, is that – despite our attachment to them – our egos are, in fact, imaginary, and we can alleviate some of those mental burdens I just mentioned by lessening its grip on us. Don’t believe me? That’s ok – we can actually verify this.

The way we dissolve ego is by fully immersing ourselves in consciousness. For our purposes, think of consciousness as simply the space in which all experience occurs. And by all experience, I really do mean all experience. Sensory experiences of your body, mental experiences of thought and emotion – every experience that you could possibly have arises in the space of consciousness. So, right now in the present moment, what is the experience you are having?

Let’s break down your experience to examine it. We’ll start with a physical sensation – the breath is usually the most readily available. Just pay attention to the experience of the breath. Don’t seek to judge the depth or your breath or change anything about it. Just fully notice what the experience is. It’s not necessary to label anything you experience – simply observe the sensations of breathing wherever you feel them, whether it’s in your nose, abdomen, chest, or elsewhere. I encourage you to stop reading, close your eyes, and try this for a full minute. Set a timer if you’d like.

If you haven’t tried any sort of meditation before, this either felt very difficult or very easy. If it felt very difficult, you probably are noticing just how easily distracted your mind is. If you found it very easy, you probably are unaware of all the times you were interrupted by thoughts. In any case, you have just attempted a minute of Vipassana, or insight/mindfulness meditation. In this type of meditation, one of the aims of practice is to expand this awareness to encompass everything that appears in consciousness without judgement or attachment.

Regardless of whether or not you plan to pursue this kind of meditation practice, let’s try to reasonably extrapolate its consequences. Imagine you are able to fully experience every single bodily sensation, thought, and emotion as they occur in each moment without judgement or attachment. Keep in mind, these three things (bodily sensation, thought, emotion) make up the totality of our human experience, and regardless of their nature they all occur within the space of consciousness. Now, here comes somewhat of a mind-blowing realization – at least, it was for me.

At any given moment, insofar as you are able to determine with everything you experience in the landscape of consciousness, “you” do not exist.

There is no “you” you to be found. The profundity of this realization cannot be overstated. Within all of the contents of consciousness, feelings of the “self” are no more salient than feelings of the body – they all exist in the same space. When you begin to observe every single thing that arises in consciousness from moment to moment, it becomes evident that there is simply the feeling of being a “self”, or the thought of being a “self.” Any sense of self is simply another thought, feeling, or sensation appearing in consciousness. It’s this very sense of self that is the ego.

The more you practice letting go of the ego and recognizing it as just another appearance in consciousness, the less it will burden you, and the less likely you are to undergo the pitfalls of overidentifying with it. So much of what we perceive as suffering is simply a manufactured perception of how an experience affected our manufactured selves. The loss of ego, then, could also be considered the dispelling of illusions. Although this methodology of meditation is Buddhist in origin, the Stoics were also known for contemplative practices aimed at reducing unnecessary self-inflicted pain.

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.”

Source

– Seneca

This is one of several points on which Buddhist/Eastern contemplative teachings and Stoic teachings align.

Let’s now return to the question of “who would you be (without ego)?” that I posed at the beginning of this article. I believe we actually can catch glimpses of what this would look like. When people speak of “losing themselves”, whether it’s in their work, art, or through some sort of impactful experience, they are talking about ego loss. The reason that it occurs under these sorts of circumstances is the same reason it occurs in meditation – you are giving such full attention to the contents of your consciousness that you detach yourself from your feelings of self, i.e. ego. Whether or not it is possible to completely and permanently detach yourself from ego is not known to me; however, I believe it was said that such an egoless state (Nirvana), free from suffering, was achieved by the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. So, to answer the question: “Who you would be without ego?”

If anything, “you” would no longer exist. All of the contents of consciousness would become equalized.

It may be impossible for most of us to dedicate the time necessary to reach this state, but in our attempts to approximate it we can still relieve ourselves of some of our burdens and improve the quality of our consciousness. And if we improve the quality of our consciousness, we improve the quality of our lives.

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