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THE LEAFLET

November 21 2024

cosplay to get unstuck, focus as stupefaction, correlation (still) isn’t causation

COSPLAY TO GET UNSTUCK

When you’re facing a challenge that feels intractable, or your default moves haven’t worked, consider cosplay. Pretend for a bit that you are an elite [something else]. How would that elite, expert [something else] approach this problem? What constraints would they work within and which would they discard? Who would they call first? What moves would they try? (If you want help doing this, ask Claude).

A short list of roles you might consider for your cosplay:

  • urban high school principal

  • software startup founder

  • basketball coach

  • grassroots activist

Read the rest here.

FOCUS AS STUPEFACTION

When my dad passed in March, I signed up to run the Crescent City Classic 10k as a little tribute to him. He ran the race several times in the late 80s and early 90s. My sister and I wore the CCC race t-shirts as night shirts when we were little.

Since the Classic earlier this year, I’ve increasingly gotten into running. The mindset that arises in you or surrounds you or occurs to you when you’re running a long way at a challenging pace has come back to me, especially on the days when I haul myself to the practice track in City Park and do the dreaded interval workout. When I’m using my consciousness to my advantage during these runs, instead of letting it drag me down, my mind gets very narrow. My language gets clipped, blunt, and abstracted - I’m not naming, analyzing, or arranging things outside myself. I’m chanting, mostly, and not even in rhythm with my strides. The correspondence between inside and outside narrows to the point of nonsense. Phrases like “in the pocket” “this is the race” “toes” “intensity” “melting miles” “i get to do this” - I repeat one of those in my head. 

I run better when I do this. I choose a sort of blindness. I deforest my vocabulary. I chant in a clearing. I run.

I’ve started to think of this as an experience of focus. And this has made me think that focus is a form of stupefaction. I am numbing myself to most things around me. And the numbness corresponds with a dumbness - my language isn’t threading me in some complex mycelial way into the infinite phenomena around me. It’s a clave keeping time.

A strategy is a focus. Focus stupefies you.

Rumelt helped me see that good strategy, sometimes, is no strategy at all. You may be in a season where diversity, nuance, improvisation, randomness will serve you. When you choose to have a strategy, you are opting out of those.

This choice might matter even more than which strategy you choose.

-eric

Read the rest here.

CORRELATION (STILL) ISN’T CAUSATION, EVEN WHEN YOU WORKED HARD AND MADE IT GOOD

Most everyone who has taken stats or studied policy or listened at some point to a TED talk has run into the truism “correlation is not causation.” It has become so commonplace that I usually find myself annoyed when I hear someone say it. Yeah, no duh, get outta here with your annoying cliches.

But it can be really easy to forget this when your team has a) worked really hard on something and b) made that thing as good or better than most things in its reference class. When conditions a) and b) are met, it’s really super tempting to say, believe, and bet that the best-in-class thing your team built is the cause of the results you’re seeing. 

It’s even more tempting when you’ve got squishy, shaky, or thin data. The things you know for sure (we busted tail on this piece; this piece is now good) can overwhelm your analysis of what this piece is actually doing for you.

A quick list of things that might make you assume causation when you don’t have evidence beyond correlation:

  • An elaborate hiring process (we have great people! It must be because of this hiring process)

  • A complicated feature of your app or product (we have so many new users using our thing so much more! It must be because of this feature)

  • A costly security protocol (we have so few incidents! It must be because of this onerous protocol)

A mystique and bureaucracy can build up around the best-in-class thing your team built. So as you grow and go, it’s worth vetting any expensive process or feature you’ve built in the past. Is this thing really driving your results? Or has it become an opera house - beautiful, costly to maintain, a reminder of what we like about ourselves, but sort of inviolate and untouchable and possibly not the reason people visit our city?

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Historian and poet Helen Macdonald on apocalypse:

Our eschatological traditions tend to envision the apocalypse as happening very fast, with the dawning of one final, single, dreadful day. But the systems of the wider world do not operate according to the temporalities of our human lives; we are already inside the apocalypse.

Novelist Ralph Ellison on living life:

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen on war:

Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric