My Mind Wanders

I follow with interest all the online discussions of jobs being eliminated by robots and software. It's far more pervasive than most people realize. I've been diligently taking Machine Learning classes on coursera and edx and we are just getting started on this path. Twenty years from now, far more human jobs will be eliminated and the garden-variety human may not have much to offer as an employee over automated systems. I say automated systems rather than robots, because I doubt humanoid robots will be that common. We didn't need a robot to get rid of newspaper ads via craigslist. We didn't need a robot to have online air reservations. You just need computers and a network - and software.

We are beginning to see people talking about a post-work society. Just in case. Just in case people don't have to work, because machines can do almost everything for super cheap and there is just no point to it. It's possible that we would transition to new sorts of "jobs" that do the things robots can't do and everyone would still be employed in a capitalist system. But, I really doubt that is possible. Billions of people don't have such special human-only skills of a sufficient level to entice someone to pay for them.  If we got there, it would have to be sort of artificial - like "make work" jobs.

I find this all quite interesting because I am a post-work pioneer.  The early retirement experience is basically a post-work one. You don't need to work, so you don't.  You think you have better things to do. But, do you?  That is a very difficult question to answer for many people, and many people are surprised and disappointed by the result. It does not bode well for a smooth transition to any post-work nirvana. It would require a huge cultural shift.  I think I am on a success path finally with retirement, but I do find myself at odds with my culture to achieve this.  It will take ten more years to see if I succeed, but I am optimistic.

Here are some observations from my post-work pioneering.

Our lives are structured by work.  When you quit working, you lose a lot of structure. There are not good non-work structures to replace some aspects of work.  The most glaring one is that some of the best social interaction is done in a context of shared activities and goals. Retirees compensate for this with play groups like golf leagues and bridge clubs, as well as volunteer organizations. But these are not for everyone. Groups that work on mental activities or creative activities are less common.  It's not necessarily enough to work alone, but in the company of others. There is something special about working with people towards a shared goal. Work provides this. The downside to work is that you may not even like the goal - or the people you are working with.  Non-work could be much better for you.  Finding a purposeful community to interact with is hardest for intellectuals whose jobs were primarily analytic. I see some of this forming on the Web now and the Web does provide some opportunities. But they are not as purposeful as they might be. My initial work-around for this was to play multi-player online strategy games. It meets all these needs but unfortunately it's not really purposeful in a real-life sense.  I am toying with the idea of finding a kaggle.com team and competing for machine learning prizes, but I suspect it would be less lively and fun compared to the gaming (sort of kidding here, it's a bit of a joke. if i could use smileys, they would be ;) and :D). To be honest, my game buddies are some of the best friends I have ever made and I would be loath to dump them. Think of it like the best bowling team you could ever play with - one that always is there for you with a positive comment. They restore my faith in humanity on a daily basis. The best part of my strategy game "family" is that it's international, multi-cultural and all ages. And free. And available 24/7 whenever I want to interact - or not. The most purposeful aspect to my online game playing is that I mentor college kids, especially the engineering majors. They always need advice. And sometimes I mentor teens on how to work in teams.  I do a surprising amount of good in this context and find it emotionally rewarding. So keep an open mind about where to find structure. It does not have to be traditional places that retirees usually find it.

When you are planning to be freed from work, you will have a list of things you have been wanting to do. But those might evaporate because they looked good compared to work, but not compared to non-work. These things tend to be activities that impose structure on your time, cost money, or involve hassle. Work involves hassle and takes up your time, so swapping it out for an activity that seems like less hassle and better use of your time seems like a win. But when you have zero hassle and total control of your time, these things might seem like ------ WORK.   Even travel is not that appealing to me, although it is common for my retired friends.  The hassle and expense factor generally outweigh the benefit to me. Starting a company? MEGAHASSLE. Writing a novel?  Time suck. So what to do?

This leads me to another observation. When all your time is your own, many things that were impractical or impossible can become possible. You fondest hobby can become your main activity. Be open. What you do does not have to "look good" to anyone else. It needs to feel good to you. You had an occupation, but occupation is not the same thing as vocation.  Current US society is so focused on money that the idea of vocation has been lost in the search for an occupation that "pays well". Post-work you need to open up your possibilities.  There are a lot of things that can be accomplished in 5 years or 10 years or even 20 that you have left, but maybe there is no pay-off until the end. This level of risk makes sense post-work. Take a chance on these things if that is what really calls to you. Because vocation comes from the Latin root for calling. We are all called to something. Sometimes more than one thing. But being occupied is not the same thing as following your calling. Being occupied is just staying busy. If you are busy you won't be listening to your inner voice. You won't know what your calling is.

And that is my last observation. People tend to thrash about when they transition into non-work. Disciplined people might feel compelled to stay busy. Think of yourself as a caterpillar.  Time to cocoon a bit.  Be still and listen to your inner voice. Waste a little time doing nothing much. Work on re-tooling.  You have time now to learn and develop skills.  If you always wanted to work with your hands making things, practice, take classes. Maybe you are really a fantastic potter and will leave the world hundred of beautiful pots. If you wanted to be a researcher, take classes on the subjects you are are interested in. That's what I am doing and coursera and edx make this incredibly productive and free. Have faith that at some point you will emerge a butterfly. Then, who knows where you will fly and what beauty you will bring to the world?

INTP here refers to the Myers-Brigg type.  This is my type. It's not a common type and it has its issues.  I have no proof that the strategy I am about to describe is uniquely or especially INTP, but my intuition says it is, so just humor me and assume it is, because I just chose the name as a convenient descriptor for the strategy I am about to describe and discuss.

When confronted with a task - a goal - a problem - people generally go through the following process:

1) Evaluate the task - just exactly what is it?
2) Decide on an approach to completing the task, reaching the goal, or solving the problem,
and finally,
3) Work away at it, using the selected approach until completion, revaluation, or abandonment

Most people only move on to 3 if they can get through 1 and 2 fairly rapidly.  They prefer to use an approach they have been provided by a teacher or an expert.  Few people are actually capable of devising approaches and even fewer actually enjoy devising approaches.  People often enjoy the "working away at it" for things that suit them, especially if there is visible progress and low chance of failure.

For typical humans, they like to spend 1% of their time in stage 1 and 2 and 99% of their time in stage 3. In their minds, Stage 3 is where all the progress is made and if you want to complete the task, you better get to doing something that makes progress.

My approach is rather different and flips the process on its head.  I enjoy stage 1 and 2 far more than 3.  My big thrill comes from devising some clever approach that accomplishes 3 with the minimum of effort and/or superior results. Sometimes that means I have to spend a lot of time in stage 1 really understanding the problem.  Sometimes that means I have to spend a lot of time in stage 2 thinking of novel approaches and testing them out or simulating them in my head. In my ideal world, I would spend 99% of the time in stage 1 and 2, and 1% in 3.  In my ideal world, I would still be the first one to finish the task out of 100 random people. And it would be the best.  That's what I strive for.  This is my modus operandi.  It is a ballsy approach. I am assuming I am clever enough to come up with a better way. I am betting the farm that I won't run out of time.

This has several implications.

Assuming I manage to come up with an approach that is much faster and better, do I share it or keep it all to myself?   Well, that depends.  In a competitive environment, I am highly motivated to keep it to myself. It gives me quite an edge. If I am able to conceal my advantage from my competitors, I can outperform them indefinitely and still have time to spare. This makes it advisable to not be too obvious.  Best to seem to be busy and just finish a little early.  This is a strategy I have employed all my life. Even better, you can move on to the next problem and start your steps 1 and 2 on that one and get even farther ahead. The challenge here is not to be detected, so deception becomes part of your strategy. This means you are going to seem aloof to many.

In a cooperative environment, of course, you want to share. Now your team all gets the benefit along with you. Maybe you get some credit. If you are lucky, they reward you in some special way. In reality, this rarely goes so well. In reality, this often leads to you being stuck with leadership responsibilities.  This style can be adapted to leadership roles, since you can give yourself the job of process improvement and guidance.  It's why I migrated to a management role in consulting and stayed with it for 20 years.  On the negative side, my time was not used in an optimal way, since my job was not innovating, it was management. This was a compromise, a not entirely satisfactory compromise.

The INTP approach really conflicts with the desires of most authority figures, even well-meaning ones. The first time through, you will look like a slacker all along the way. It is very incompatible with earned value, progress metrics, and teamwork in general. Your pace is unique. It's out of step. In any environment where incremental progress is tracked and counted you will be anomalous and often you will be weeded out.  You may be punished. Many teachers and managers insist that you do it the "correct way".  The "correct way" kills your soul. I think this is why INTPs are often poor performers in school.  Over and over, I have found my thinking style to cause conflict.

And then, there is the interesting question of why?  Why is this my approach?  How did I come by it?  Is it nature or nurture?  Can it be learned? What's special about me cognitively?

Despite annoying people, my unique approach is very obviously valuable.  Evolution no doubt produces people like me at some low rate so that innovations happen. As long as a society incorporates the accomplishments of this strategy, it will progress. I would guess that the rate of progress depends greatly on the level of nurturing and tolerance for people like me. Progress is not always something people like. Some people prefer things to be stable - especially people who are the elites in the current arrangement. And then, sometimes the elites keep all the innovations to themselves, generally by making sure that the innovators work directly for them.

And then there is a question of whether this could be done "en masse"?  Is this best a solitary approach?  Could you form teams of people like this?   Are there teams doing this? Or are there really just people working on various aspects in parallel?  I am not sure.

And then there is the productivity paradox.  Normal people think of the process output as the product. They think "This would be great. If I could do this I would be so much more productive.".  But that assumes that you would deploy it only selectively and be focused on producing the normal output the rest of the time. Perhaps your time would be spent 10% on innovating and 90% on production? It just does not work this way. To deploy the INTP strategy you have to be uninterested in spending your time in producing the ordinary results.  The object of your interest is the process itself. That's the real product to you. So you will spend most of your time "thinking" and begrudgingly a small amount of time doing. You will seem very unproductive to most people, because they are judging you by normal standards.  If you were paid by the hour spent in production, you would be very poor.  Even being paid by the piece, you make no special amount of money. Only if you are paid royalties will you be rich. Programming is a good occupation for people with this skill, as long as it is automating something tricky. You figure it out once, capture it in code, and then sell the code while you go off to solve another problem.

Such a disruptive technology!  One of the big casualties will be China.  All those factories making cheap plastic stuff - who will need those?  It will be the designers who will be rewarded, not the manufacturers.

Yet another case where the middleman is going to be cut out. The designer and the consumer can communicate directly without a some factory needing big infusions of capital in between them.

Watching the reports of various anti-aging research, it does seem possible that a "cure" for aging might be discovered before I would normally die. In some ways, this would make my life make more sense at this point. I would happily take this cure and move on to a second career as an academic or researcher. I can see now that is what I would always have been happier doing. It's sort of late at 60 otherwise. So, I am rooting for you guys researching this. I would pay whatever it cost and then work another 100 years.

So much of my thinking was shaped by programming. People who do not program extensively are missing out on some uniquely valuable mental training.  Now that I am back into it, I am noticing my habits of thinking that I owe to programming.

Today's efforts provide one example. I decided to tackle an issue with accessing the correct directory for jinja2 templates.  When I switched over from django to jinja2, I could not get it to work without putting template htmls in the main directory.  This is an ugly place for them to be.  You want them in their own nice little directory. So this need to put them in the main directory - this is like a "superstition".  Your brain thinks of it the same way as a superstition.  You don't know why it works, but you know it does and you are afraid to change it.  What I learned from programming is that this is faulty thinking.  There is a real reason.  And if you just try, try, try, you will understand it.  The world of the program is complex enough to mimic real life, but still simplified enough that complete understanding is possible.  You just have to push on through the fear. Don't give up.

So, I pushed on through and now I understand what jinja2 is doing much better.  My templates are in the subdirectory where I want them to be.  My directory is all cleared out of miscellaneous files and the little test application is working.

After I moved files around and reran the app, the chat was broken.  My first "superstition" was that a moved file was needed.  I moved them all back!  Still broken. So, I pushed on through and figured out what must be broken.  After staring at the code long enough, I remembered I had made a change to it last night as an experiment.  Obviously, a failed experiment that, once backed out, repaired the function.  Same thing with looking at the user profile.  My mind jumped to the file move as the cause.  But it turned out to be a django/jinja incompatibility.

Programming has made be very non-superstitious in general.  I assume that there are explanations for everything. That quirks are just accidents.  That superstition is really just a lack of understanding.

Persistent browser-based games (PBBGs) are a popular form of entertainment. Multi-player strategy PBBGs have great potential for research applications.  This type of game includes elements of leadership, conflict, planning, cooperation, competition, comparative metrics, and economics.  Games can represent real-world systems on a scale that can be studied and instrumented.  By changing the parameters of the system the game embodies, and adding and eliminating system features, the effects of real-world policies and systems could be inferred.

These games are not prohibitively expensive to build or operate.  Many have very limited graphics and animation and yet are still popular.  Typical popular version of this type of game are Eve, Evony, Grepolis and Battledawn. With limited advertising, these games have attracted many thousands of users.  The population required for study need not be thousands either.  My experience of playing a game that is exceptionally well-designed to model social interaction on cooperation and competition, Kings of Babylon, has convinced me that a player population of 250-500 is more than adequate.

How could these games be developed and used?   A partnership between Computer Science, Graphics Arts, and social science departments could be used to develop a game-based capability for use by social scientists.  The game technology itself has limited research potential, and could be developed and maintained by undergraduates as part of a game development curricula.  But the resulting game platform could be a very powerful tool for social scientists.  The features and parameters of the game platform could be used to instantiate game sessions that focus on particular social research questions.  By varying them, the effects of different real-world policies could be inferred.  The games could be used for a single short game session. But, many of these games have sessions that last weeks, months and even indefinitely.  Changes could be introduced mid-session or between sessions. Demographics of the player population could be controlled and, if they are made open to the public, could be very diverse. Most of these games are played internationally, so cultural differences could be studied as well.

What would a representative research project look like?   An economics researcher desiring to study the impact of taxation could create a session that included a taxation component in group economies.  A one month session could be played with tax set at 10% and be followed by a session with the tax set at 40%.  This could be reversed and repeated as often as needed to get a representative sample of behavior. The game would be instrumented to provide metrics on the player behaviors.

Just on taxation alone, it is easy to envision many experimental designs:
1)  Effect of lowering and raising the tax rate
2) The effect of who controls the spending of the taxes: leader, leaders, highly-taxed, everyone
3) The effect of graduated taxation vs flat tax
4) The effect of income taxes vs consumption tax

Why I Play Games

Throughout my adult life, I have played various computer-based games. Since I retired, I have spent a lot of time - maybe too much - playing Kings of Babylon, a persistent browser-based game.  Family members might say it is an unhealthy amount of time.  I am getting burned out on it now.  The game is not being maintained and has lots of problems.  I have started playing Battledawn instead.  Unless I can come up with a relatively low-key way to play that one, I probably will burn out on that one too.  But, it is probably time to move on to some other activities.

During this period, I have often reflected on what the game is doing for me.  Because if it was not doing something for me, I wouldn't be playing it.  I have played single player games and multi-player games.  Both have value for me.  So, here are my thoughts:

1) I learn to take risks and compete aggressively in a safe environment.  Risk taking and competition don't come very easily to me - because of my gender and personality. Compared to the average woman, I am quite competitive and a risk taker.  Compared to the average man, I am not. This has been a hindrance to me in my life and something I have to work at. Now that I am retired and my children are grown, there is no reason not to take risks.  I need to get into a risk-taking mindset.  The games sharpen competitive skills very effectively. They get you comfortable with competing and risk taking. I will say, that in the team games, I tend to take on a supportive feminine role - nonetheless competitive and risk-friendly.  I have come to call this my inner Athena. As Athena, I am a warrior. I am fierce for my team, but I am also clever and generous. It is a good feeling.

2) Learning and mastery is fun.  These games present a challenge that requires learning a non-trivial simulation environment.  The environment resembles reality enough that you feel like you are mastering some little corner of the universe.  It is gratifying to be ranked #1 in this little universe.  There is a feeling of accomplishment.  That said, when the game gets too easy, it gets boring and this aspect goes away. Multi-player games have less of this problem, because real people are involved.  You can never really master real people, can you?  Regardless, games will challenge you mind and make you learn strategic and planning skills. I am constantly impressed with their potential for teaching young people these skills. Parents don't realize how valuable this experience can be for a teen. I would encourage parents to play one of these games with their teen.  It would be an amazing experience. I plan to play with my 10 year old grandson when he is 12 or 13 and ready to play with adults.  Even for me, with twenty years of management experience, I learned some new things.

3) Nothing is quite as rewarding as being part of a successful team, is it?  When you play a combat game with a team of people, you bond in the same way that athletes and soldiers bond.  You are attacking and defending together. People sacrifice themselves for the team. There is something very precious and heartwarming about this. I have encountered this in real life several times and these are peak experiences for me.  In multi-player games, this is much easier to come by.  You know the people on your team in ways that you don't even know some of your family.  There is a bond formed there. This restores your faith in humanity and makes you appreciate human beings - if you manage to do it. Many players never go there.  I feel sorry for them.

4) When you play multi-player games you meet people of many different background, ages, and nationalities. This is pretty interesting, especially if you are someone like me who has lived most of my adult life in a highly educated professional bubble. Sure, it is probably 80 or 90% male.  And maybe mostly 15-35 year olds.  But they seem to come from everywhere and every possible background.  Since I worked in engineering, I enjoy teaming with men.  Young men make fun teammates. It has helped me keep a young outlook and get used to the attitudes of that generation in a way I would never have otherwise.  I am sure it is interesting for them to find out they can be friends with a 57 year old woman.  Don't let anyone tell you that people playing these game are not interacting!! This is very challenging human interaction - beyond what you might encounter in real life.

5) Of course, games are great for relieving boredom or loneliness. Hanging out with twenty people just shooting the breeze and talking smack can be pretty entertaining.

6) Gameplay can be reaffirming.  It can make you feel valued and like you are accomplishing something. I missed that feeling of being valued as a manager.  I missed the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly accomplishments. There are risks to getting this from games, since games are not real, really.  This is the biggest worry I have for myself and other people who are too involved in games.  You might miss real life. I don't have the same concern about social interaction.  The social interaction in games is very real.  But the accomplishment is not. A teen who is failing in school, but ranked number 1 in a game is a disaster in the making!