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Context: Crisis

Climate change, inequality, debt, geopolitical tensions. We as a society are in or nearing crisis on many levels. Now we are in what looks like a revolution here in the US, with the MAGA movement attempting to consolidate power. Some of us are hopeful this will lead to a more efficient government and a new era of prosperity for Americans. I for one am angry with the current situation, and given the magnitude of the April 5th protests1, I know many others are angry as well. Perhaps we can agree on the need for a new system, even if we can’t agree on what that system will look like. I believe new systems are forming now. We have the opportunity to contribute toward growing this new system.

I used the word grow and not build, because I think if we focus directly on building a new ideal system, then it is likely that we will fall back on ideas from the old system to make it more quickly. I’d rather for people to have autonomy to follow their interests, because this leads to genuinely new ideas. If this autonomy is also coupled with close social connections, then the learners can be supported and the needs of the group can be met. I came across these ideas through unschooling2, but I think they apply more generally. In my experience a good way to support self-directed learning and social connection is through small learning groups. Such groups can be a small step towards positive societal change.

Why small groups?

I have personal projects that I really want to do but struggle to find the time for. I do a good amount of reading, listening, and watching about my interests but a lot less of the doing than I would like. It’s somewhat surprising too because a lot of my interests involve computers so it’s not like I need to buy expensive equipment. In my core, I feel this need to learn, be creative, and to grow, so it feels like I’m withering when I’m not taking action. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one with this affliction. If we are not acting, then society is not benefiting from our creativity. What if we formed small groups to support each other in our learning and creative endeavors?

There is a dramatic difference between learning in a group and learning alone. When you’re alone you have limited feedback, and it is easy to get stuck. In a group, others will tell you if your plan doesn’t make sense, and if you get stuck they can help you think of other ideas. A group requires communication of ideas, and the process of formulating the ideas into words helps to solidify the concepts. In interacting with members of the group, you can observe what others are doing and ask if something is unclear which can lead to learning for both members. With these benefits, members of a group can gain skills that would be very difficult to gain alone.

I’ve been lucky to experience some of these benefits in a work team. I’m part of a software development team at my job at Spheryx. We do pair programming (often remotely) while working together on the code. It’s amazing how many questions come up. For example: “when should we break up a large function into smaller functions? What was that keyboard shortcut? Wait, that doesn’t make sense, how does that work?”. We each develop expertise in certain areas, but then teach each other the skills whether it is using a new library or a new programming practice. When we are planning our work, we will sometimes intentionally give a task to a person who has less experience in that area so they get a chance to learn. This group learning has helped me to go from a physicist who could write some scripts in Python to someone who can coordinate and contribute to large software projects.

But the incentives at work can be focused on results instead of on learning and creativity. In my experience learning really depends on having autonomy, having room to explore and try things. So I think it can be helpful to have learning groups outside of work (or at least outside a workplace where the management can define the priorities).

These kind of self-directed learning groups are fun! I was part of a small group of Code for Newark members who got together to learn javascript. It was great! We became friends and went on to work on other projects together and with other members of the organization. But these groups do not even have to be explicitly about “learning”. Some of my best experiences growing up were working together on projects with a couple of my good friends and my older brother. We made all sorts of stuff in our backyard: a push cart track with banked turns, a large jump for our bikes, a teepee big enough to stand in, and a working well. There is no way I would have done half those things if I was on my own. Why can’t we have some of that free exploration as adults?

Obstacles to small groups

Part of the challenge is many of us have been schooled. For all those years, our efforts were externally evaluated and graded. The teachers decided what was important to learn. The pattern continues in the workplace where the focus is on meeting externally chosen company goals. In all of it, there is a culture that we should be productive and not “waste time”. I want to break free from this mindset in order to experience fun, powerful learning.

I try to remind myself that when we freely choose what we learn, much of it will be practically useful. That’s part of the fun. It’s cool to make something that helps people. If we are drawn to work on something then we can put in immense effort and it won’t feel like “working”.

But even if we are open to the idea of directing our own learning, how will we have time? I know for myself with work, child care, and just daily life (laundry, groceries, cleaning…), I feel overwhelmed pretty often. It’s hard to imagine adding something else on top.

I think we can approach it in a similar way to exercise. We don’t have to train like we are in the Olympics. It can help to find exercises that are enjoyable and to do a little regularly. Usually it doesn’t end up costing as much time as expected because we no longer need as much time on other activities (for example winding down in the evening). So with the learning groups, we can find others in similar life situations and find an intensity that works for us. Something regular but maintainable.

Proposal for a small learning group

I am hoping to form or join a small learning group. Here is what I think could work for me in my current life situation. The format could be something like this:

  • A group of about 3 – 8 people
  • Group chat for random asynchronous communication (ideally allows for threaded conversation)
  • Daily or weekly messages briefly describing what you’ve done, what you intend to do next, and any challenges you are facing
  • Weekly or monthly audio/video call that could include
    • Quiet calls where all are working together on their own projects
    • Talking together about the projects/challenges the members are working on
    • Governance of the group through consent3
      • For example, defining a term for the group, that can be renewed if the group desires

I think it would be useful for the group to be clear on its goals. Here are ones that I am interested in:

  • Supporting each other with making progress on personal projects and learning
  • Helping members find careers that respect them as human beings and that benefit the wider community
  • Creating new organizations or businesses that contribute to the common good
  • Adding to knowledge and culture through open source work that can be shared and modified by others

Is this for you?

I’d love for others to join me in forming a group (or multiple groups). Here is how I pitch it:

  • Making progress on creative work helps the soul. You probably will be in a better place in your other relationships, which will make life run more smoothly.
  • Think of the groups as a self-directed graduate program/workshop. You won’t get a degree but you will learn and grow.
  • The group is a door, a beginning to a new chapter in your life.

It feels great to do something about the situation we are in. We can regain a sense of agency and find a sense of purpose.

This is an experiment. We can try it to see how it works. If you are interested, please reach out to me and hopefully we can start meeting soon.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_Off_protests ↩︎
  2. Unschooling is an alternative approach to education where children are allowed to pursue their own interests and adults support the children in this effort. See this article “What is Unschooling?” by Earl Stephens at https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/guest/earl_stevens.html ↩︎
  3. The principles from sociocracy could be helpful. Sociocracy is a governance system where decisions are made through consent and power is distributed through the organization. See this article https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/ ↩︎

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I recently started using overcoming isometric exercises, and I’m thoroughly enjoying them. These are exercises where you try to move an immovable object. Last month, I made this DIY isometric trainer setup by Reddit user 16of16 and have been practicing these kinds of exercises since then. It has opened up heavy resistance training for me which has seemed out of reach for the past decade.

I haven’t consistently lifted weights since grad school. When I lifted back then, I really enjoyed it. I liked feeling stronger, and I even enjoyed the actual lifting itself. It’s great to be able to give maximum power without breaking anything or hurting myself. But I stopped.

Weight lifting stopped being fun. After grad school, I didn’t have friends to go to the gym with. I like lifting free-weights, but without a gym buddy spotting me, I couldn’t safely give maximum effort. I tried using the machines, but that wasn’t as fun for me. Also I was commuting into NYC from New Jersey. As anyone who has done it knows, it can be soul-draining. It became very hard to justify regularly going to the gym.

I had another option, calisthenics. I had started doing push-ups as a kid which started me on a life-long practice of calisthenics. I love that I can do these exercises anywhere. I’ve learned a variety of different exercises at this point that I can do until the point of failure. So although I tend to do more reps than I would with weight lifting, I still can challenge myself and get stronger.

But I missed exerting maximum effort and being under a heavy load. Especially with free weights, the whole body becomes a force chain. Every part needs to contribute in order for the weight to be lifted. It is exhilarating.

Recently, I learned about overcoming isometrics which is allowing me to exert maximum force without weights. Isometrics are exercises where you exert force while not moving, for example wall sits. Overcoming isometrics is a variation where you push or pull against something strong that won’t move. It could be pushing against a wall or trying to lift a weight that is much heavier than you can lift. It’s cool because you can exert as much or as little force, for as long as you want. Despite nothing moving it is very much real force, and in a lifting position I feel the same kind of heavy load that I would with free weights.

To try out this kind of exerciese, I built the DIY isometric trainer setup from Reddit user 16of16. The idea is simple: a plywood board that you stand on, a strong bar that you hold, and a strong cargo strap looped under the board and hooked onto either end of the bar. The cargo strap is adjustable, so you can use this for various lifting positions. The exercise involves your feet/body pressing against the board and your hands/legs/back trying to push the bar away from the board. The cargo strap prevents it from moving and provides the resistance force.

Here’s how I made it:

  • I got the following items:
  • I filed the edge of the plywood to make it more rounded so that it doesn’t rip the cargo strap.
  • I removed the carabiners from the small cargo loops, and attached the loops through the circular end of the hooks at the end of the cargo strap.
  • To use it, I lay the cargo strap flat on the floor, lay the plywood on top, insert one of the bars through the loops at then end of the cargo strap, then adjust the length of the cargo strap as desired. Then I am ready to exercise.
Man standing on plywood board and holding a 1 inch diameter metal bar against his chest. The bar has cargo straps looped over the ends, and the cargo straps loop under the plywood board. The man seems to be straining upward against the bar with slightly bent knees. In the background a wood paneled wall and a few pieces of exercise equipment.
Me demonstrating my overcoming isometrics setup

With weights the visible aspect is the motion of the weights. With overcoming isometrics there isn’t much that is visible, although I do notice the strap going taut and the plywood flexing slightly. So I need to focus on what is happening internally: the compression I’m feeling and the effort of my muscles. But when I do that it works; I can challenge myself. I have a similar physical response that I would have after lifting a heavy weight: raised heart rate and faster breathing.

One of the reasons, I looked into isometrics in the first place is that I’ve heard they are good for joints. I struggle with runner’s knee. It tends to flare up if I do things like squats or jumps, and I can usually get better with physical therapy type exercises. So I hoped that overcoming isometrics would allow me to do heavy exercise. Alas my knee pain came back, so it is not a silver bullet. But it does seem to be easier on the body in some ways. I don’t get sore after these exercises.

My current plan is to do a mix of exercises, overcoming isometrics, calisthenics, and physical therapy exercises. Hopefully that will keep the aches and pains at bay. I also plan on periodically tracking the force that I can generate on the isometric setup. I use a crane scale to measure the force. I think it will be fun to see progress. I’m optimistic about it.

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We recently made significant progress helping our kids tidy their things. We have two boys 3 and 6 years old. The improved organization has been a relief for me because for a long time I have felt overwhelmed when I see all the toys, clothes, books, and little knickknacks in their room. To learn from the experience, I’m writing about what worked and what didn’t.

It is important to me to stay connected with my kids, and avoid actions that break the connection. My close relationship with the kids is key to supporting their needs. The associated love and closeness is a need itself, but the connection helps me to see and respond to my kid’s other needs. In my experience, pushing past the kids consent to do something “good” for the kids tends not to be worth it. The kids start to rebel, and then our routine starts to become a nightmarish ordeal. So I wanted to find a way to help the kids tidy their toys that they could consent to. A seemingly impossible task for kids who love toys!

But I felt it was important to do something because our kids needed help with organizing their things, especially with the toys. The main challenge was the sheer number of toys. Between Christmas, birthdays, relatives giving small things on random occasions, the kids using a small allowance to buy toys themselves, little gift bags from friends birthday parties, and toys in happy meals…it really added up. In addition, the toys span a wide range of sizes, shapes, materials, and colors. To make it even harder, many of the toys were part of a set, and if one tiny piece is missing it can ruin the whole set.

This kid’s strategy for organizing their items was to use every horizontal surface in their room as a heap. The advantage with this strategy is that the stuff you use tends to be on top, and there is more room to see a variety of items. Also you never have to worry about putting things “back”, you just put them down (a big plus for anyone, but especially a 3 year old!). The downside is that the sets of toys get completely mixed together so it is almost impossible to find all the pieces. Also it seems like the visual clutter makes it hard for the kids to find all the toys; they tend to play with a small subset. From my perspective, the heap strategy conflicted with my need for order and clear pathways in case of a fire.

To help the kids, I knew that I wanted to use principles from Marie Kondo’s work (see her book, the life-changing magic of tidying up), because it had made a big difference in my life. In 2019, I had gone through the whole Marie Kondo process, and it had really helped. It took me over a year but I finished in April, 2020. I wrote a post about that tidying experience. One of the things I learned was the importance of clearly defining where things will be stored.

That learning didn’t fully sink in, because when we moved into a house in 2021, I didn’t create a well defined storage system, and my things started to build up again. Also we had not yet gone through our jointly held stuff, and with a house we started to get more things. To reverse the trend, I started going through my things again, and after a few off and on attempts, I finished going through my own things this year. I haven’t finished with the storage systems yet. Writing about tidying has helped me remember how important storage is. So I just added a storage project to my to do list!

More than just “walking the walk” tidying my own things is preparing me to be able to help the kids as they go through their things. I don’t have everything figured out, but I’m learning, sometimes the hard way, about what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, I think tidying is building up my ability to hear my own inner voice and experience the joy of following it. I want to share this experience with my kids. I want them each to be free to follow their own inner voice.

I started actively working with the kids on tidying in August this year. I was home to watch the kids on the last week of August because they didn’t have daycare or school. We took a family vacation for the first half of the week, but in the second half I helped the kids go through their things. I did it in the morning before the kids had started watching shows, and each day only worked about an hour on it. That way the kids stayed fresh. We only did a little each day, but we kept on coming back to it and started to make some progress.

We went through things by category as recommended by Marie Kondo, starting with clothes. Despite toys being the more obvious source of clutter, it turned out that they both discarded a good amount of their clothes. So much so that it was a bit of a problem for my wife who wanted to make sure the kids have enough nice clothes. After discussion the kids kept some of the nice clothes and we kept some of our older son’s discarded clothes in storage for our younger son. We saw an immediate benefit from discarding clothes. It was a lot easier to help them get dressed in the morning. There were fewer options, and all the options were clothes the kids liked.

As we went through the decluttering process, it became important to clearly define which things and areas are managed by which people. Marie Kondo recommends that each person have a place for their things, and for them to be free to manage it how they like. I gained more clarity about this idea from sociocracy, which is a form of group organization where things are decided by consent. In sociocracy, there is this idea of domains which are areas in which a group or individual can do things without asking for permission. Domains are super helpful because they allow people to act and be creative within the domain without negatively affecting the larger group.

So I started thinking about how to apply domains to the kid’s room. Making sure there were clear paths in the room for fire safety is under the parents domain, but determining which regular clothes to keep is under the kids domain. The exact boundaries need to be negotiated. For example, at first I was thinking the choosing of the kid’s clothes could be under the kid’s domain, but we needed to make an exception for the parents to ensure there are some nice clothes for the kids. Similarly as we went through books, there were some children’s books that were old favorites of us parents, but that the kids were ready to discard. We decided to designate the bookshelf downstairs as under the parents domain, and we put those parent favorite, kid books downstairs. The kids could decide which books to keep in the shelf in their room.

The kids don’t have much paper yet, so we skipped it and went to toys. Although, we will need to come back to papers because my oldest is in 1st grade and starting to get lots of papers from school. We started with discarding the toys that didn’t spark joy. The “does this spark joy?” question can be a bit hard to understand for kids. I found that asking “Do you love this or do you think someone else would love this?” worked out pretty well. It seemed easier for the kids to part with toys if they thought that maybe another kid would take care of the toy. We put the toys they want to keep in a separate room to clearly separate them from the toys they hadn’t gone through yet.

After a couple Saturday mornings of going through toys, the kids lost energy in the discarding process. Most of the good toys were in the separate room. To shift things up, we applied domains. I got some large plastic bins and assigned 4 bins to each of my sons and put them in the kid’s room. Then we took the toys they had decided to keep and put them in the bins. These toy bins are under their domain. All the rest of the many miscellaneous toys we moved to the other room. The room is under the parent’s domain, but we hoped that the kids would still help go through the rest of the toys so the pile was under the shared domain of the parents and the kids. So now anything left in the pile needs the consent of the parents to keep, or the kids could move the items to their bins in their room. The shift in framing helped to give the kids another burst of energy to go through their toys.

As we went through the remaining toys we realized that many of them were part of sets and that it would be better for us parents to manage storing them. The toy sets are difficult to keep organized (especially for young children) and tend to be better as shared toys. Instead of each kid having their own small Duplo collection, it’s more fun to have one large set of blocks. Also practically it is much easier to put all the blocks of a certain kind together, instead of remembering which blocks belong to which kid. Thankfully the kids were open to this, so we put aside the toy sets they wanted to keep.

At this point the kids got tired of going through toys. The last bit my wife and I agreed to go through. It took us a while to find the time to go through the toys. We didn’t feel like we had the capacity to have more toys coming in until we had finished going through the current toys, so we stopped occasionally buying small toys for the kids on grocery store trips. This change motivated the kids, especially our older son, to persistently ask us to finish going through the toys. With that push, my wife and I were able to make some time to go through the toys. We decided what we were willing to store and bagged up the rest to be given away. In mid-November, we got a baby sitter to watch the kids while we went through the final things and set up storage for the toys.

The toys all have a spot now. There are shared sets of toys like hot wheels cars and tracks, dino figures, puzzles, and Magnatiles in the other room. Then in the kids room there are the favorite, random toys in their bins. There are still toys and various items scattered across the floor most days, but it is much more manageable to quickly put them away. That’s a win!

This organization effort definitely cost time and energy, but for us it was a good investment. We were already spending a good amount of effort clearing paths through piles of toys, so it made sense to spend effort now to get to a more sustainable situation. I’m glad that the kids were involved. I feel pretty confident there won’t be any big upset in the future about missing toys that we gave away. It was helpful using domains to clarify where stuff goes and who decides what. I’m hopeful that this perspective could help in other areas. Most importantly with things more organized, there is more room to play!

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The following post was written in early May 2020, but for some reason I never published it. I’m not sure why. I found it recently because I was trying to remember when I had gone through my Marie Kondo tidying challenge. I’m working on a followup post on tidying with kids, and I want to reference my original tidying challenge.

About a year and a month ago, I took on the challenge to tidy my possessions according to Marie Kondo’s KonMarie system. It’s been a marathon, but a great experience. I started at the end of March 2019, and called it done about two weeks ago [end of April 2020].

The idea is simple: go through all of my possessions and only keep the ones that “spark joy”. The challenge for me was my large numbers of possessions.

The KonMarie system breaks down the process into first discarding things that do not spark joy, and then finding ways to store all the things that do bring joy. Furthermore the discarding step is broken down by category: Clothes, Books, Paper, Komono (miscellaneous), and Sentimental.

This breaking down by category was critical for being able to get through this monumental task. Sometimes I would go for a few weeks without doing anything, but when I started again, I wouldn’t be starting from scratch. I would pick up at the category where I left off.

I finally finished the sentimental items around February or March, and so then I worked on storing things. I’ve found storage to be critical for two reasons: first good storage sparks joy and second good storage helps give natural feedback that helps to keep things tidy.

The joy of good storage surprised me. I had always thought of clothes drawers as utilitarian items. Discarding clothes didn’t change that, although it did help prevent that kind of guilty feeling of seeing clothes that I never wear. But following Marie Kondo’s advice, I rearranged the clothes first off by folding them vertically, then sorting by color, and using empty spaces to store things that go with clothes like hats, ties, and sunglasses. The end result is that I smile when I open my drawers.

I’ve found that good storage will naturally tell me when I need to do a bit of tidying. Marie Kondo recommends that you keep your storage areas about 90% full. So when I get a new shirt or a new book I can put it in the drawer or on the book shelf, but as the last 10% gets used up I can tell that I need to discard things that I no longer need. This has already happened with clothes and with books.

Working on storage was hard in a different way than discarding things. It requires creativity and sometimes materials like boxes. Also there is no clear definition of done. I ended up going with the it’s done if feels done to me. Essentially, I aimed for the areas where I store things to spark joy in some way and to look maintainable.

It’s not perfect for sure, but I’m happy about my stuff and how I’m storing it. I’m proud of that, and can say that I have finished.

Of course there is more to do. Maybe I’ll hang up some pictures or artwork. I’d love to go through my digital possessions and discard what doesn’t spark joy and find good ways to store what brings joy. Hopefully, we’ll go through our joint possessions as a family. We’ll take those things on at some point, but for now I’ll just celebrate this milestone.

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I installed the ActivityPub plugin and now people should be able to follow my website from the fediverse! I’m excited about it. I’ve been really enjoying Mastodon, but my website has really languished. I’m hoping that by adding it to the fediverse, I’ll be able to enjoy both. I also added the WordPress app to my phone, so maybe I will write short posts from time to time on the bus. We will see!

Here are a few notes about how I did it. I followed the guide about it on Fedi.tips. I also added a new user to my website so that it should show up on the fediverse as @david@davidbruffner.com. You should be able to search for that handle on whatever fediverse application you use, and then you can follow it and receive posts in your timeline if you like.

This is a test to make sure that everything works.

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It’s been a little over a year since my last post. Since you’re reading my personal blog you might be interested to know what I have been diving into in the meantime. Here’s a short list:

  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning. I really think that AI systems need to be free to learn in order to become really useful. I was excited by Jeff Clune’s work on open-ended learning. I heard about his work through the TWIML podcast. Jeff Clune worked on this amazing project called POET where the AI system created obstacle courses and used them to train its parkour skills. I also got into Neural Operators which are a class of neural networks that map between functions instead of between vectors like normal neural nets. The sound like they are great for physics simulations.
  • Personal knowledge graphs. I switched from Evernote to Obsidian and Joplin. I adapted my task management workflow using this post, by Ruben Berenguel, as inspiration. There was a lot of fiddling and learning involved, but I like how all my notes are in markdown text files now. I feel more free.
  • Joined Mastodon social network. I’ve been really enjoying it. If you haven’t heard of it, it is a decentralized social network kind of like Twitter. It is part of the Fediverse which is a collection of different decentralized social networks that all interoperate together. Here’s my Mastodon profile, https://raphus.social/@davidruffner. Come check out the Fediverse!
  • Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). I did a deep dive into it. I learned a lot from the Libre Lounge podcast, hosted by Serge Wroclawski, and the FOSS and Crafts podcast, hosted by Morgan Lemmer-Webber and Christine Lemmer-Webber. I’ve been slowly transitioning my apps to open source alternatives.
  • I’ve been dabbling in the Elixir and Scheme programming languages. I took the Hands-On Guile Scheme for Beginners class and enjoyed it. I’m still looking to get better at the Actor Model, but have definitely gotten some exposure to functional programming.
  • I did a dive into Category Theory. I think someone shared about it on Mastodon, and I was blown away by this series of lectures by Bartosz Milewski.
  • I’m did a deep dive into Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication. It has helped me to grapple with what is going on between Israel and Gaza, and closer to home as helped with interpersonal conflicts. I’m taking the Bigbie Method intro course and enjoying it so far.
  • FOSS video games. I’ve been having a lot of fun finding free and open source video games to play myself and to share with my two sons (5 and 2). Here are some of the top games so far:
    • SuperTuxKart. We all love it! I got some xBox360 controllers so we can play on the computer as if it is a gaming console. It’s fun finding fan-made tracks and cars too.
    • Sonic Robo Blast 2 a fun retro 3D Sonic game.
    • 0 A.D. An excellent real time strategy game like Age of Empires

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Note: It’s been almost two years since my last post. We had a baby, and life has been more full with two little boys. It’s been lots of fun! But I kept coming back to this post, so eventually I was able to finish it. No guarantee on when the next post will be...

Recently, I have been really excited about the Free Will Theorem by John Conway and Simon Kochen. It states that if we have free will then elementary particles have some degree of free will too1. If you believe we can make free decisions, then this theorem has profound implications. In particular, it challenges that dichotomy between inanimate matter and us humans with our minds, emotions, and free will. Perhaps electrons and galaxies also have some degree of internal life?

But first do we have free will? I believe we do have a limited ability to choose between different options and that our decisions have the potential to change the course of the unfolding universe. But this feels like a religious belief, because I can’t prove it. When I look at the laws of physics, things look to be deterministic or to be driven by randomness. Fundamentally, I’m a bunch of electrons, protons, and neutrons that obey the laws of physics, so how does my free will fit into this picture if it exists at all?

These questions about free will are core to the mind-body problem. One way to state the problem is, since we are matter where does our subjective inner life come from? I want to write about some of my grappling with the mind-body problem, and about how the Free Will Theorem helps.

Wondering about the mind body problem

I’ve struggled with what you could call the mind-body problem since I was a young. I remember feeling uncomfortable when people described the human brain as “just a bag of chemicals”. It didn’t make sense to me. How could a bag of chemicals learn, make decisions, and love? But we are are made from matter, so I was left with an unsettled feeling, that maybe I was wrong. In college, I considered the idea that maybe inner life doesn’t exist at all. I didn’t know it at the time but this is called eliminative materialism2. To me that is an incredibly dark idea. Fascinating that you could have a whole universe without any awareness, but also deeply lonely and disturbing. But I could not accept this idea because it would mean denying my own inner life.

I also considered the idea that perhaps I am the only one that experiences inner life. What if the people I’m talking to are just responding according to the electrical signals in their brain that have been trained by their experiences and by evolution? What if they have no subjective experience? Perhaps them talking about it is just a quirk of evolution like peacock tails. I also didn’t know this at the time but this describes solipsism3. It didn’t make sense to me because I’m probably not that special, so most likely other people have an inner life as well.

After graduate school, I entered a period of questioning the foundations of my Catholic faith, and in the process learned about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He writes in “The Phenomenon of Man” about his theory that all things have a inner subjective experience4. I found this idea to be profound. I had already believed that animals have some type of consciousness, but now I was invited to consider even electrons to have some small amount of inner life. Teilhard’s view of the world and the mind is a form of panpsychism, specifically panexperientialism5. This idea suggests that all matter has some degree of mentality from humans down to electrons.

But say we and everything else in the universe has this inner experience, does it matter? Do our thoughts change anything or are they fully determined by our evolving physical configuration? Is free will an illusion? I am definitely biased is this area. I can’t shake the idea that our choices matter, that we are not entirely determined by our past. I do admit that I am heavily influenced by my environment, but still I believe that at least in a small way I can choose between different paths.

With these types of questions there are no easy answers, but the Free Will Theorem gives a useful perspective. It describes free will as the ability to take an action that can not be predicted by any previous information in the universe. If this type of free will exists then it can change the course of the universe; the story is still being written.

The Free Will Theorem

John Conway and Simon Kochen are both mathematicians but their Free Will Theorem has implications in physics and philosopy. Conway gave a series of lectures about this theorem, and acknowledged that you have to be a little crazy to make a big statement outside your field6. But they had something important to say.

The setup

To make their proof, they imagined a situation where two spin-1 particles (for example certain atoms) are first “twinned” or entangled (in a singleton state) and then one of them is moved to Mars while the other remains on Earth. There is an experimenter A on Earth and an experimenter B on Mars and each experimenter can measure the spin of their respective particle. If they measure the squared component of the spin along a certain direction, then they will get a 1 or a 0. It turns out that for spin 1 particles, if one experimenter measures the spin in three orthogonal directions then result will be two 1’s and one 0 in some order. This is derivable from quantum mechanics (I don’t know how!), but they take it as an axiom which they call the SPIN axiom.

The second key piece of the experiment is that the particles are entangled. Even though one particle is on Earth and the other is on Mars, when each experimenter measures the spin in the same direction they will measure the same value for the spin. This a strange effect. We don’t see this type of behavior in daily life, but it is what we observe experimentally for entangled electrons and other very small particles in entangled states. Conway and Kochen call this effect the TWIN axiom.

The final setup for the theorem is the limit on the speed that information can travel between the two experimenters. From relativity theory, we know that no signals carrying information can travel faster than the speed of light. Since the experimenters are so far apart this means that each has time to perform an experiment before the other can influence it by sending a signal. They call this the FIN axiom. With these three axioms they derive the following theorem.

The theorem

This paper has set up a situation that relates the experimenter’s choice of measurement direction to the response of the particles. The theorem shows that if the experimenters can freely choose the direction to measure a particle then the particle’s response is free in the same way. This is a strange, but intriguing idea. Here is how they state the theorem:

The Free Will Theorem (assuming SPIN, TWIN, and FIN)].

If the choice of directions in which to perform spin 1 experiments is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then the responses of the particles are equally not functions of the information accessible to them.

John Conway and Simon Kochen

The measured spin does not exist before the measurement

We are used to properties existing before you measure them. For instance, we don’t expect that measuring a box will change its dimensions. But small particles in the quantum regime are different. They can be in a state where the measurement outcome is random. It turns out for this specific example of spin 1 particles, you can prove that the measured spin does not exist before the measurement. If it did then there would be a deterministic function that gives the spin based on the direction of measurement. Such a function, called a 101-function, does not exist. The proof is call the Kochen-Specker paradox and depends on a geometric puzzle with no solution7. That’s good, because if the measured value already existed then the particles would definitely not have any choice in how they responded to the measurement.

Breaking down the proof

Not only does the measured spin not exist until the experiment, the Free Will Theorem proves that it can’t be predicted. The proof works by contradiction. First it assumes the opposite, that it is possible to predict the measured spin of the particle from information available to the particle. After a series of deductions John Conway and Simon Kochen find a contradiction. If the opposite of the Free Will Theorem is false, then the Free Will Theorem is true.

So how do they find the contradiction? Here are the steps they follow:

  1. First they assume that there actually are functions that could predict the responses of the particles given any information available to the particle before the direction of measurement was chosen by the experimenter.
  2. Then they use the TWIN axiom, that the particles are entangled, to show that the function for particle a is equal to the function for particle b if the measurement directions match.
  3. Next they note that the information available to particle a before the measurement does not include the direction of the measurement of particle b, because according to relativity there are some frames of reference where particle b is measured before particle a. This allows them to define a function that returns the measured spin values using only the measurement directions as input.
  4. Finally they observe that this new function is a 101-function, but such a function does not exist. So by contradiction they prove the Free Will Theorem

I keep having to re-read the theorem to follow through the logic, but each time it makes sense. If you’re interested, I definitely recommend you read it yourself. As far as mathematical papers, it is relatively accessible.

Implications of the Free Will Theorem

At the low level, the Free Will Theorem is just talking about whether it is possible to predict the outcome of a particular experiment, but the conclusion has deep implications. If the experimenters could pick the directions for the experiment then the particles could pick their response. How can particles pick a response? Do they have some degree of consciousness? It strange to think about everything in the universe having some small amount of inner life, but if it is true then it points to where our own free will comes from. Perhaps the free choices of the particles that make us up don’t completely cancel out, which would leave us with some ability to make free choices ourselves. In their philisophical remarks, John Conway and Simon Cochen write:

The authors strongly believe, however, that there is a way our brains prevent some of this cancellation, so allowing us to integrate what remains and producing our own free will

John Conway and Simon Cochen

It is not clear at all how that emergence of our free will comes from the free wills of our constituent particles. But it makes a lot of sense to me. From this perspective, there is no need for a magical life force that animates the body. Matter itself is animated and has some limited ability to determine its own destiny.

Of course, there is no requirement to believe in free will for people or for sub-atomic particles. The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a deterministic interpretation that is gaining popularity8. The idea is that the wavefunction of the universe is what is ultimately real. It evolves deterministically, but contains projections that correspond to different versions of reality. Each projection is a parallel world. Every time there is what appears to be a free choice of a particle or a person, the world divides with one world for each possible outcome. There is a certain beauty to this theory because everything can be explained mathematically, in principle.

I find this Many Worlds interpretation to be unsatisfying, because I have such difficulty letting go of the idea that I can make choices and that they could make a difference. But I want my beliefs to match reality as much as possible. The Free Will theorem provides a coherent picture of how free will works if it exists. I find it to be an expansive and exciting view of the world. I like how John Conway and Simon Cochen end their paper:

Einstein could not bring himself to believe that “God plays dice with the world,” but perhaps we could reconcile him to the idea that “God lets the world run free.”

John Conway and Simon Cochen

A world where all the protons and electrons are running free sounds great to me. I hope it’s true. Until I find evidence that disproves it, I’ll take it as an article of faith,

  1. Conway, John and Kochen, Simon. “The Free Will Theorem”. URL=Arxiv.orghttps://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079v1
  2. Ramsey, William, “Eliminative Materialism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/materialism-eliminative/
  3. Stephen P. Thornton. “Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL=https://iep.utm.edu/solipsis/#H1 accessed 12/30/2022.
  4. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, p56-57
  5. Kind, Amy. “Panexperientialism, Cognition, and the Nature of Experience”, Psyche 2006: VOLUME 12 ISSUE 5. URL=http://journalpsyche.org/files/0xab06.pdf2021-05-27 09:05 Panpsychism
  6. Conway, John. “Free Will and Determinism in Science and Philosophy”, lecture series, URL=https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/Free+Will+and+Determinism+in+Science+and+Philosophy/1_h7r12hbc
  7. Kochen, S., Specker, E., J. of Math. and Mech. 17 (1967), 59–87. URL=http://www.iumj.indiana.edu/IUMJ/fulltext.php?artid=17004&year=1968&volume=17
  8. Sean Carroll. “Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space”, 2021. URL=https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.09780

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I recently read Positive Discipline, the First Three Years, by Jane Nelson and Roslyn Ann Duffy, and have found their approach to be practically useful in learning how to better parent my almost three year old son1. It does not magically solve all problems, but does help me to roll with the punches. This is very important because when parenting a small child everything can be going along fine and then all of a sudden things change abruptly. Nelson and Duffy illustrate the importance of understanding your child’s (mis)behavior, so you can understand what is age appropriate and what could be an effort to regain connection. With that understanding of your child as a foundation, Nelson and Duffy recommend being kind and firm toward your child.

My wife and I are frequently realizing that we need a new plan when my son’s behavior abruptly changes. This happened after Christmas, when my son picked up the habit of throwing all his toys on the floor and then climbing on Mom or Dad’s desk and getting into stuff2. He also started throwing marathon fits when we turned off the TV. I started getting frustrated and angry and was overly forceful in taking my son away from my desk. It wasn’t effective because my son got a defiant look in his eyes, and went right back. Things felt out of control and unworkable for me. I wished that my son would just “listen” to me more.

Nelson and Duffy point out that if we want our kids to be strong and assertive as adults then we can’t demand them to be quiet and compliant as kids (Ch. 2). So that argues against yelling or punishing to enforce my arbitrary rules. But I also can’t let him watch many hours of TV and play with scissors, because things would get chaotic and dangerous – not good for us parents or the child. So what can I do? Positive Discipline gives some parenting tools that can help.

First I need to understand my son’s behavior, to figure out what is age appropriate (Ch 9.). At his age play is super important so it makes sense that he would want to get into his toys right away. With more toys than normal because of Christmas, maybe he just wants to see all of them before he decides on a toy. From that perspective throwing them all on the floor makes some sense. And then getting into Mommy and Daddy’s desks makes sense too because he has a need to explore and because he wants to imitate us. Finally with the TV, my son wants to have the autonomy to decide how long to watch. So these behaviors are totally age appropriate, but very difficult for us parents. This knowledge helps diffuse my anger. My son is not a little demon, he’s just a little person trying to explore and have autonomy.

Next I need to take action in a kind and firm way, that is respectful of my son’s needs and desires and of mine and my wife’s. Nelson and Duffy talk about the importance of deciding what you will do instead of what you want your child to do. It makes sense to focus on what you control. So in this case, I decided to pack away some of my son’s toys to make it more manageable when he throws them on the floor. It turns out that with fewer options, he ended up playing with the toys more and got into our desks less (a nice surprise!). With the TV fits, I didn’t know what to do so I looked it up and brainstormed with my wife. We came upon the idea of using a timer to set up an agreed upon time for TV (use of timers described in Ch.5). I was shocked when my son quietly shut off the TV after the timer went off! Since then there have still been fits, but the timer has helped a lot.

In writing about this episode, I realize how I could have done things differently that might have been better. The most important thing is to first connect with the child before taking corrective action. I could have validated my son’s feelings and apologized for being overly forceful. Sometimes just asking for a hug makes all the difference. Second, I need to remember that these Positive Discipline tools are not about controlling the child to make my life easier. Instead the idea is to collaboratively come up with a solution that works for all. As the parent with more experience and power, I definitely take the lead, but it’s critical to involve the child as much as possible. Sometimes that means offering limited choices and letting the child decide, or sometimes it means asking the child to help.

It’s about finding what works for you and your specific child. The specific actions will change with each kid and over time, but the overall approach can be helpful. Instead of yelling and punishing the child, we can seek to understand and connect. Letting kids do whatever they want is not the only alternative. Nelson and Duffy show there is a way to be firm while still being kind. We can involve kids in decisions and activities, allow them to face the challenges of life, and be there for them to encourage them. Ideally this approach respects the needs and desires of the child and the adult. I find it hopeful. I don’t think it will make things easier for me (or the child!), but I hope that it will make the experience more meaningful and joyful.

It’s difficult to share my experience with applying Positive Discipline to my parenting because I don’t want to come off as having figured everything out. Since starting to write this post, we have come up against new parenting challenges. Things are definitely a work in progress! But, writing about it helps me to learn, and maybe someone else will find this book useful too. To anyone who interacts with kids, I’m curious to hear what you find helpful. And if you are a kid, let me know what parenting approaches you prefer!

  1. Jane Nelson and Roslyn Ann Duffy. Positive Discipline, the First Three Years. Harmony 2015. https://www.positivediscipline.com/products/positive-discipline-first-three-years-revised-and-updated
  2. As remembered by me and with permission from my wife and son. March, 2021.

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I’m interested in building up a personal store of knowledge – good ideas, data, memories, and notes – and saving it in a way that I can quickly and easily make use of this information. Without some external way of saving things, I tend to forget them. The dream is that these ideas and pieces of information don’t have to be re-thought up or re-found each time but can be explored to rapidly generate more ideas. Ideally this would help me solve problems and help generate new knowledge for the wider society.

In reality this has turned out to be much harder than I expected. In my experience, it is easy to save information but hard to find it and make use of it later. The vast majority of my files have never been used after I saved them. When I do happen to remember a piece of information that I want to look up, I tend to have trouble finding it. This unfortunate situation surprised me. I had bought into the idea that there is essentially no cost to saving things digitally so I should save everything, and second that digital tools should make it easy to find things. I was wrong on both counts.

The difficulty of storing information became a real problem for me in grad school when I was doing research for my PhD in physics. I had to deal with countless journal articles, presentations, calculations, brainstorming sketches, experimental data, notes from talks/classes, and different versions of code (I wasn’t using version control, aaahhh!). At first, I thought my problems were just caused by the wrong organizational system. So I tried different systems, but despite having advantages and disadvantages they didn’t solve the underlying problem for me.

Thanks to my misadventures, I’m learning that forgetting is a feature not a bug. When I try to remember all my ideas and information, the default organizational systems struggle and while specialized tools can help they also tend to silo information. It turns out, there is a need to limit the inflow of information and the amount of work in progress. I need the information and ideas that are relevant to me, and everything else is unlikely to be needed, and should be let go. In a way my organization system for saving ideas and information is an extension of my brain. My brain is quite good at forgetting things (sometimes too good!). So while it is important to have good tools and organization, shouldn’t my system also forget things?

The default ways of organizing tend to be digital analogues to the way we store papers: papers on the desk, in notebooks, and in folders. These systems fail in similar ways to paper based systems. The simplest approach is to just put everything you need on the desktop, but this quickly fails if you have more than around ten files. The next simplest is to create notebooks; essentially storing the files in chronological order (for example by starting the filename with the date). This helps because you can quickly find a file if you remember when you worked on it, which tends to happen for things you recently worked on. However this approach makes it hard to see connections between ideas from different times1. You can’t re-arrange the ideas as you learn more; they are fixed in chronological order.

The next strategy that I’ve tried is putting files in a folder structure according to topic. This seems like a reasonable idea, but quickly becomes quicksand for ideas. Inevitably, I need to change the folder structure as I learn to better reflect the association between my files. The changes make it hard to remember where things are and breaks any references to file paths. As I create more folders, I find it difficult to remember the context underlying the relationships between folders. This can lead to folders with mashed up collections of files and sub-folders that don’t make sense.

Based on these struggles, I have turned to more specialized tools as a way to solve my organizational challenges. They can make a huge difference, but can create silos of information. For example, I started using Zotero in grad school, to keep track of all my research articles. This was a huge improvement over putting papers in topic based folders and trying to cram paper keywords into the filenames. Zotero has useful tools that allowed me to generate bibliographies automatically and to save papers directly from the browser. But now I had a separate store of papers that wasn’t tightly integrated with my research data and information; it was in a separate silo. This turned into a problem when I needed to reinstall my operating system. All my other files were restored but I had trouble recovering my Zotero papers. Eventually I was able to recover them, but it highlights that separate silos increase the complexity of securing my data.

Ultimately tools won’t help if the information is not useful. Marie Kondo says throw away all papers (except what you really need)2, and I think the same could be said for digital information too. She says this because according to her core principle, your things should “spark joy” and she finds papers rarely spark joy. Do my digital files and information spark joy? The majority probably don’t. I’m not totally sure because most are in these old folders that I never look at.

Information tends to bring me more joy when it is connected to something bigger, and this is where tools can help. For example, the “Untitled” file in an old folder called “New” is probably not useful. The context is lost; it is just a fragment. In contrast, a note in an Evernote notebook is part of something bigger. Evernote allows the notes to be displayed in different ways which can help the context to be recovered, and it is easy to search. It’s also easier to make connections between different notes with tags or with links.

Based on these experiences, I have begun to seriously fight the accumulation of unnecessary fragments and now try to only keep things that are part of a “whole”. One practice that has helped a lot is to channel the inflow of information. By default, there many different places that new files are saved, which is bad because it’s hard to evaluate what should be kept. To make things more manageable, I create a single “Inbox” folder where any new file is saved temporarily until it can be saved in an appropriate place (I got the idea from this blog post3). This little change gave visibility to the problem, because I could easily see files building up. Now that the files were in one place, it was more straightforward to decide what to keep and what to delete (although I still put it off sometimes!). This is a small step toward protecting my digital space and being intentional about what I allow in.

Limiting the amount of work in progress is also critical. Work in progress can be many things: unfinished projects, ideas that need to be pursued, or emails that need to be responded to. Too much work in progress is bad for multiple reasons (Agile frameworks like Kanban4 and Scrum5 are dedicated to limiting work in progress), but in regard to storing information, the unfinished work means that there are lots of associated files and information that don’t bring joy. Instead of being sources of useful information, these incomplete files require additional work and are difficult to understand because of missing context. One tactic that helps limit the work in progress is to create a single “Current Projects” folder for things that are being actively worked on (this is another good idea from this blog post3). With all the active work in one place it is easier to see when things are getting overwhelming. When that happens, I need to let go of things that I am never going to do and work to finish the projects that are important.

Organization requires deep change in behavior. I am part of the knowledge organization system, so if the system is going to succeed then I need to be working too. This means being more intentional with what I keep and with how I keep the things that are important. The hard part is letting go. Sometimes that means deleting now and sometimes it means letting something be buried in the bottom of a list of notes. Either way this reserves the prime spots for the most useful information. As part of my system, I also need to focus on what is most important. This is a huge challenge because it requires saying “No” to some demands, and risking the disapproval of others. When those demands come from bosses, significant others, or children it’s difficult to say no. But by setting limits, I will be able to make the most of my limited resources and give the most back to those in my life.

The effort is worth it for me. As I have been implementing these changes, I have found that I spend less time searching for files, notes or projects from a few months ago. It still happens sometimes, but usually when I didn’t follow my own rules! My store of information is not some magically useful thing that I will use in the future, but a limited resource that I rely on and enjoy now. It has room to grow, with plenty of unneeded information that can be pruned and lots more that can be added in an integrated way. This practice is helping me to think more clearly. Letting go of information, forgetting, is helping me to make connections between the important ideas that are left.

  1. David B. Clear, “Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive”, https://writingcooperative.com/zettelkasten-how-one-german-scholar-was-so-freakishly-productive-997e4e0ca125.
  2. Kondo, Marie. the life-changing magic of tidying up. 2014 p 96.
  3. Mark Virtue, “Zen and the Art of File and Folder Organization”, https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15677/zen-and-the-art-of-file-and-folder-organization/.
  4. David J. Anderson, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business.
  5. Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process.

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Image of restored specimen of a squat quadruped with knobby back
An ankylosaurus: by Emily Willoughby (e.deinonychus@gmail.com, http://emilywilloughby.com) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30925563

Like many kids, I was into dinosaurs. I had fun reading about the different types of dinosaurs, and trying to figure out which was the biggest, strongest, or most powerful. Over the years, I got interested in other things so dinosaurs have not been in the front of my mind. Recently my son has helped me to reconnect with the amazing world of dinosaurs. My son (two and half years old) loves dinosaurs and has been starting to learn some of their names (like ankylosaurus) so I have naturally been learning with him. To my surprise I’ve found that dinosaur research, and paleontology as a whole, has made tremendous progress since I was a kid.

Here are some specific examples:

  • Spinosaurus is the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever and had a crazy looking spine on its back. The finding of new Spinosaurus fossils as spurred a lot of research trying to understand whether it was aquatic, what the spine was for, and what it ate. The evidence is suggesting that it may have been one of the only swimming dinosaurs!
  • Tyranosaurus Rex was huge, but how fast was it? There has been a lot of back and forth but according to this 2017 paper, they probably weren’t that fast and mostly walked. Very disappointing! I still am hopeful that they could run as fast as a Jeep, but it did get me interested in the general relationship between animal size and speed (see this interesting blog post going into the details about animal speed)
  • Dinosaurs had efficient respiration with air sacs like birds (living dinosaurs!). In addition their bones were often pneumatic meaning that the air passages went through the bone. This made the bones light and strong which may have been one of the traits that allowed dinosaurs to get so big.
  • There is a wealth of evidence and theories about how different dinosaurs and other animals evolved. I really enjoyed this Eons show exploring how pterosaurs evolved the ability to fly.

Dinosaurs remind me that the world has not always been like it is now; it has changed and most likely will continue to change. The dinosaurs showed that huge land animals are possible. Could they evolve again? Could genetic engineering help? Jurassic park made it seem like a bad idea, but I would be for it. On a darker note, the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs (except the birds!) in particular is a reminder that millions of years worth of effort can be erased in a day. But perhaps the survival of our ancestors and the ancestors of other current species is an inspiration that life could survive the next big catastrophe. I like to remember we are part of the same story that includes the dinosaurs, and it is not over yet!