Game theory is bollocks.

That’s all.

Imagine you’re at a restaurant you’ve never been to before.  You order a steak, medium.  The waiter brings you a medium steak.  You eat it, pay the bill, and leave.  Unless that steak was phenomenal, you just ate a steak at a restaurant and that’s the end of that.

Imagine, now, you’re at another restaurant.  You order a steak, medium.  The waiter brings you a well-done steak.  You tell the waiter your steak is overcooked, and to please replace it.  The waiter goes into damage-control mode and rushes the offending meat back to the kitchen.  Within seconds, the house manager is at your table apologizing.  Maybe he gives you a bottle of wine on the house, maybe he comps your steak, something.  A new steak is brought to you.  This time it is cooked as you ordered it, and the chef is delivering it personally.  He apologizes as well.  He’s got an off-menu amuse-bouche plate for you to try, too.  It’s all to assuage you, to make you feel special.   Unless you are made of stone, it probably works.  You eat, pay the bill, and leave.

What happens next, however, is different.  You have a story.  It has conflict and drama, rising and falling action.  You tell your friends the saga of this restaurant and how they so effortlessly made things right, and how pleasant it all ended up being.  You would definitely eat there again, and encourage your acquaintances to check it out.

Does it matter if the steak was identical in quality to the one at the place that got it right the first time?

Working in network security, I can definitely say there is truth to this.  My most loyal customers are ones who have been the victim of some sort of malware infection, data breach, intrusion, or other nightmare.  In those scenarios, my products and services have – in a technical sense – failed.  Where I succeed, however, is in the fact that the way my team handles these incidents is off-the-charts five-star excellence.  A company paying for security that never has an incident isn’t thinking about their security.  All anti-virus vendors are equal if you never encounter anything bad.  When you slip – and everyone slips eventually – the eyes are on you.  If you wake up a bunch of engineers at three in the morning, do forensics and analysis, and hand-walk malware samples through the virus lab so you can get an engine update pushed out in less than an hour, people remember that.  They know that even though their security provider slipped – everything was taken care of beyond satisfaction.  They know that they don’t need to fret about the next time, because they know how it will go down.  Even feeling the sting of the incident, switching to a new vendor seems like madness.  They’ll be an unknown, and when they slip you’ll judge their response against what just happened.  It’s all too risky, and network security is all about risk – avoidance, reduction, and management.

Montgomery Scott said to always multiply your repair time estimates by 2.  Say it’s going to take two hours, then do it in one.

Underpromise, Overdeliver.

There are lessons, and then there are unintended consequences.

Let’s go back to the restaurant.

Your close friend goes in and orders a steak.  It comes out exactly as ordered.  Near the end of the meal, your friend calls the waiter over and is visibly agitated.

“I heard you give out free appetizers here, and wine.  I’ve been told the service here really goes to extreme lengths to make sure everyone is happy – and while the meal is certainly fine, I really don’t feel like anyone’s gone out of their way to take care of me.”

What should the waiter say?  At this point, he’s trapped.  What can he do?  Encourage and exacerbate the situation by folding to this customer, perhaps.  He could get offended, he could push back some.  He’s in an untenable situation.  The manager and chef are complicit, too; calling them out will be no panacea.  Everyone showed up and did their job the best that they could, and someone is disappointed.

How do you recover from that?

Let’s move this narrative along.

Your friend tells you about how wrong you were, about how poorly he was treated at this restaurant you so highly recommended.  Neither of you are likely to go back, because one unmitigated failure – however perceptual – overcomes any number of soaring successes.  The story of the cock-sucking bridge builder comes to mind.  What went wrong?

You went in with moderate expectations of the restaurant, and those expectations were likely quite similar to what the restaurant staff expected of themselves.  They actually failed, but then in recovery the raised the bar.  Your anecdote gave your friend a very high bar, a level of expectation that the restaurant was not prepared for.  Everyone was doomed to disappointment from the beginning.

Objectively, the restaurant has made three steaks.  Two of them were correct.  66.7% accuracy.  That doesn’t sound too great, but it’s all about perception.  In your eyes, you don’t see the first one.  They’re 1 for 1, 100%.  For your friend, 0 for 1 – 0%.  The big killer here is the person who seems them as having failed isn’t the person that got served the bad steak at all!

How can an organization – or even an individual – manage expectations at any kind of scale?

Thankfully, and damningly, scale is irrelevant.  At the smallest quantum of interaction – the personal relationship – expectations are constantly recalculated based on a decaying average algorithm that is inscrutably unique to every person.

How many of you have had a teacher or parent tell you, with a look of sadness, that they had expected much more of you?  It’s the “you” in that statement that burns the most.  Other kids may have performed even worse than you – but this is about expectations.

When you disappoint someone important to you, you make a note of it.  If they’re important enough, you intend to give extra effort to avoid that particular failure in the future.  When a relationship is an incalculable series of triumphs and failures, you cannot know where the bar is at any point in time.  When confronted with the awkwardness of a misstep, if communication fails, it will either be a race to the top or a race to the bottom.  If both people are simultaneously disappointed in each other, which do you think it’s going to be?

It’s the answer to that question that I believe is the measure of us, and have yet to be happy with the answer.

* Finally listen to his old answering machine tape

* Let it all out after however many years it’s been

Everything I’ve ever accomplished adds up to nothing.  All that I touch turns to ash.  There is no future in a world where the rules are unpredictable, where people’s decisions and actions abide by no algorithm.

We’re all faking it, trying to make sense of chaos viewed through a tiny window.  I spend so much time and effort arranging and classifying, only to step outside and realize I’ve seen only a minuscule fraction of the tempest.  Nobody is a person.  No person is alive.

I’ve explored so much, looking for meaning, even at times for happiness.  Those things exist but only as noise.  There is no signal.  I have fully come to comprehend the questions I’ve been facing.  Unfortunately, I do not like the answers.  I had hoped for better.

I’ve been a part of my life for about three decades now, and empirically have found the experience to be highly overrated and unseemly.  I don’t want to do it anymore.

The imagery of a fork in the road implies choices of equal parity.  Go left, or go right.  Stop and think about it first, if you must.  A precipice also comes with two choices.  Step back or jump off.  The terror and anxiety of that situation is far beyond that of any road journey, but mechanically they are the same.  Two choices.  Pick one.  Take your time.

The metaphor breaks down when you look at reversibility and interference.  If you take the wrong road, you can go back and go the other way.  If you step back from a precipice instead of jumping, you could always jump later; but if you jump, that’s it.  There’s no going back.  Also, someone can push you off of a cliff in a burst of action.  It’s much harder to force someone down a road and keep them there.

A sheer drop disguised as a fork in the road would be a treacherous thing indeed.  Just putting a foot one direction to try it out can result in free fall.  By the time you’ve recognized the situation, you are hitting the rocks below.

—

Is there a basic human need to create crisis?  Do people need catastrophe to properly frame the good times?

Humanity is a factory that only manufactures disappointments.

I generalize, of course, but I think that is what the mid-life crisis is.  The final death throes of a life spent fighting the Earth’s rotation as it gives way to a more gentle resoluteness to just be.  It’s terrifying to imagine.

When an old man does something for his old woman, obviously against his better judgment, he does it with a twinkle in his eye and a smile.  He knows the world expects nothing else from him.  He is given a pass.  An old man can no sooner argue with an old woman than the sea can stop being wet.  There’s a security in that consensual knowledge, that stereotype, that global understanding.  The entire world mugs the camera and says, “Well, what can you do, am I right?”

How does that relationship work when the man still has a self to worry about, and is still grappling for the aforementioned control?  He could point to the old men, draw on the power of that association, and after what would seem a prohibitive explanation, be given the pass.  However, doing so would be at the cost of his other battle – the one for the self, the one for control over his life.  Winning on the eastern front comes at the cost of the western, etc.

The individual no-win scenarios are the micro representations of the macro struggle of life itself.  Children playing Connect Four learn rapidly to recognize the dreaded unfettered three-in-a-row that represents an impending and unavoidable loss.  The rules say nothing about stopping the game there, though, so two more pieces must be played for someone to secure the win.  Those with a logical mind start playing against “Connect Three, Open On Both Sides” to try to avoid it, but ultimately everyone is still playing Connect Four and when you lose, you lose.  The day a young chess player has the epiphany that there is no ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ based on the number of pieces remaining is a watershed for that player.  The realization later that life is chess, the game is much longer than we expected, and our opponent is far more ruthless and cunning can tend to undo that cognitive victory.  Knowing you have a finite number of pieces with which to play the rest of your life will make you go mad trying to keep them all safe.

Sometimes you wish you could just pass, and not move any pieces.

I’ve gotten off-topic.  What does it mean to be a good man?  What is manhood?

Surely having a family counts.  You get bonus points too if that family isn’t a bunch of drug-addled criminals, I suppose.  What does it mean to “have” a family?  Anybody can join an army, but very few of those who do will ever be able to say they “have” an army.  The only things a man truly owns, other than his skin and guts (which is a questionable ownership) are what he makes for himself.  Furniture and families.  So we narrow it down.  Don’t just be in a family, be in a family that you are at the “head” of.  What does it mean to be the head of a family?  Charles Manson was the head of a family.  Is he a good man?  Hemingway was a prick and a womanizer.  Show me a man who says Hemingway wasn’t a good man and I’ll punch him in the face, if Zombie Hemingway doesn’t do it first.  Where do we draw the line?  Is all we have the resignation of old men, to sit on the porch waiting for something interesting to pass, or if not, to convince ourselves that we faced the uninteresting with honor and dignity?

What is the appropriate age for a boy to become concerned with the concept of Legacy?

I once cried to my father that I was terrified by the impermanence of everything.  I told him that even if I could carve my face into the Moon, that too would fade eventually, along with all human memory.  He just smiled, told me that was nothing new or inventive to worry about, and that every man has those thoughts at some point.  I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over it, though.

I told a friend recently that there could never be any more heroes, and that we would eventually destroy all of the heroes of history.  The sharper the lens used to view someone, the rougher they are to view.  The higher resolution and fact-rich nature of information concentration today makes it easy to see that guys like Thomas Edison and Alexander Hamilton weren’t that great, but there is no antithesis to be found for villainy.  A greater collection and analysis of historical information won’t magically reveal that Pol Pot was a pretty good guy, or that Josef Stalin “wasn’t so bad, really.”  In that capacity, it is only evil which makes an indelible mark on our collective psyche.  The heroes who battled evil fade and are even torn down by truth, but the antagonist is rarely, if ever, whitewashed.

Is that a truth, a source of wrongness?  Are we like a black shirt, washed too many times, never to be as black as the day we were made?

If I wanted to do something about it, although I doubt anyone has ever successfully posited a functional “something” that could be done, would that make me a man?  Or, is the manly course to accept it, and do the best I can with what comes?

Like everything I write and think these days, these are questions without answers.  Masturbatory explorations that will never offer solace or respite to any.  I write to write, and sometimes just marshaling all the words and punctuation marks around for awhile gives me a fleeting sense of ownership over them.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the future of American civilization.  I live in a world where, because of my home life, I am exposed to a significantly larger amount of “pop culture” than I would be inclined to seek out on my own.  So little of what we consume is authentic in any capacity, with the most damning thing being the moniker “reality television.”

Lady Gaga is a prototype that in one or two iterations will be an organic marionette, the glorification of vapidity and headless sexuality.

In seeking to broaden the scope of reach and depth of penetration of marketing, have we obviated that the future thinkers and architects of civilization will come from within the target demographic?  How can children that are raised on media consumption in its current form go on to develop the analytical and cognitive abilities necessary to even perpetuate the status quo.  Will it all be automated by then, Idiocracy- or god-forbid Terminator-style?

I built a bookcase for my wife for Christmas.  Hopefully it will be around long after I am gone.  That seems to be novel and quaint now.  Is the concept of an heirloom outmoded?  Have we stopped – in a general sense – making them?  What do you intend to pass materially to your children?  Now, did any of that originate with you, or was it passed to you by a previous generation?  What are we making now that is built to last?

Television does not discover, reveal, and broaden the reach of previously-unknown cultural phenomena, It creates them out of whole cloth.  Ed Hardy wasn’t some cool brand that was spotted on a bunch of trend-setters and piped to everyone else.  A nigh-blitzkrieg of placement within a staggering number of reality shows and on cut-rate celebrities literally built a market for the merchandise out of thin air.  The upside to this is that there is no other reason to wear one of these items, so it can safely be assumed that anyone you see with some of this stuff either a) subscribes to the alternate reality of mass media, or b) is a paid shill.

The lack of a connection with the rest of the world fostered by modern living creates a sense of unease in me, and causes me to have flickers of odd desire, like someone with an iron deficiency wanting to gorge themselves on steak uncharacteristically.  I want to drive across the country on a motorcycle.  I want to live off of the land for an extended period of time.  I want to write a novel, though I don’t have any idea what it would be about.  Robert Pirsig wrote at length about value and quality, and I have a sense that the last shreds of it are slipping away from us – from me.  Everything is disposable.

Everything I want to do requires me to buy something, and that makes me sad sometimes.  The knife that Bear Grylls uses costs over $700.  Do I need that?  I am not Bear Grylls, though I sometimes fancy myself capable of doing what he does.  At least, I think I would be if I were forced to do so.  Motorcycles.  Typewriters.  If I want to do any more significant woodworking, I need at least a table saw.  And sawhorses.  It doesn’t stop.

Individualism is still capitalism in these parts.  He who shuns the system is still a consumer, just of different products.  Google will serve me advertisements relevant to my interests all the same.

• Motorola CLIQ (I no longer want this after reading Engadget’s review of it from October)
• Futurama: The Complete Collection
• Tritium Keychain
• Utili-Key
• Advanced Arduino Starter Kit
• Ontario Knife SP16 SPAX
• REI Gift Cards