003: Goalies and Logical Types

[kylec]

The best cure for the bad habit of mistaking a map with the territory is to find another map of the same territory that contradicts the first, and to understand how both can be accurate. It’s when we cross-reference the two that the dogma breaks down and the details come through. Having more or less trashed the goal-oriented mindset in favor of process, I’m now going to play goalie for the former. So: 1) Are there cases when orienting to an end condition gets better results than orienting to the processes involved in bringing about that condition? 2) If so, how do I choose which perspective to use?

I can answer the first question with a resounding “yes.” Here’s an easy proof: walk to a point across the room. Tell yourself to walk there, then walk. If you’re a reasonably healthy adult, this should be an effortless act. Almost certainly, you did it by issuing the mental directive, “walk there.” Now try it again but focus on the process of walking. Shift your weight to the left foot, bend the right knee, pull the right heel up, followed by the toe, reach out, place the heel on the ground, roll your weight through to the right toe, roll onto your left toe and extend the left hip, bend the left knee, pull the left heel and toe up, bring the left foot forward, place the heel on the ground, etc. Pay attention to each detail—don’t focus on the end goal, just the process of walking, and you’ll be across the room by next week.

By the time you’re an adult, walking is a well-rehearsed habit that happens outside of your conscious control when you decide to do the abstract collection of movements we call “walk.” Try to dissect it and bring it under conscious control and you end up with a clumsy mess. That might lead us to believe that when a process is practiced to the point of being an unconscious habit, it’s easier to focus on the end goal than the process. True, but even a process you’ve never tried before can go much more efficiently if the process is ignored in favor of the goal.

To test this, draw a circle and crosshairs about 1.5” in diameter on a blank piece of paper. That means a circle with a vertical line and a horizontal line that intersect at the middle. Grab that spool of thread and safety pin that you always have handy, and cut a thread 12-20” inches long. Doesn’t have to be precise. Pass one end through the safety pin and hold both ends of the thread between the thumb and forefinger so that the pin dangles beneath your fingers.

Prop your elbow on the table and hold the pin directly over the center of the crosshairs. The rule here is you are not allowed to move your arm, hand, or fingers. Concentrate on the pin and imagine it starts to rock back and forth along the vertical line. Do this until it swings like a pendulum—with no movement on your part—from one end of the circle to the other along that line. Now imagine it stops and re-centers. Then do the same for the horizontal line. Stop and re-center, then imagine it spiraling out clockwise until it traces the circle. Then counter-clockwise.

If you were able to do this, you technically cheated, because you moved. Pay close attention to your hand and you might feel microscopic twitches directing the pin. If you tried to consciously move it, what you’d get would be big disgusting ham-fisted swings that struggled to follow the lines. By fixating on the end, you subconsciously organized the very precise muscles in your hand to accomplish the end without any conscious idea of how it might be done, having never practiced this before. So dead is the hypothesis that goal-orientation only works when the process is practiced to the point of automation. Clearly it works, so I should be able to ignore all that process garbage and go back to visualizing myself swimming through a pile of money in a converted water tower just outside of town and I’ll get there much more efficiently.

Let’s go back to the walking example to see if that holds true. Now imagine you’re with your family and you want everyone to walk to the car right this instant. You need to leave right now in order to be on time, so there’s no logical reason to linger. Go ahead and imagine everyone walking out the door in single file and climbing into the car, then start walking. If they’re still getting dressed, texting, or finishing a box of pop-tarts, try verbalizing your directive—they can’t read minds, after all. Now walk. Unless you’re Cesar Milan, you’re late.

What happened was a confusion of logical types. An individual confused himself with a family. Gregory Bateson points out that a lot of fundamental errors in everything from individual thinking to scientific experiments spring from this confusion. The basics are as follows: our minds tend to organize things abstractly as units, which we put in classes, which we put in classes of classes, and so on. A familiar example is how organisms are categorized, from top down, by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Each lower level is nested within the higher level. There can be multiple different species within a single genus, multiple genuses (genii?) in a family.

A member of a class is not the same as the class—does not exist on the same order of magnitude. Becky is an example of homo sapiens, but she is not the entire species. And while a member of a class might share characteristics with another member of the same class, they too are not the same thing. Becky and Paul are both homo sapiens, but Becky is not Paul.

The way we define the class boundaries is more or less arbitrary, but when it comes to people, I like to think in terms of individual, family, community, nation, species, biosphere. Each of these is a system (I’m a system of systems made up of cells, a family is a system of individuals, etc.). The problem in the goal-oriented vision of the walking family is that the activity was organized on the individual level but expected to take place on the family level, an error of logical type. I can coordinate my own movement much better by focusing on the goal because most movement occurs unconsciously, but all cells in my body are organized in a single class called “Me.” I am not the other members of my family even though we belong to the same family. Each of them organizes their own individual movements. Whether or not there exists a system of feedbacks we could call a “family mind,” I don’t happen to know. But even if that were the case, the family mind is not any individual mind that participates in it, and therefore no individual can organize laterally within the same class, or vertically to a higher class. I can only organize within the system of cells my mind governs—me.

When it comes to the family, I am a small system nested in a larger system. So I provide feedbacks that influence the family, but so do others. My influence is never absolute, not even in a family with a feared tyrannical patriarch (though I can dream). If I want to achieve a desired end goal within a higher class, I can’t simply issue a directive and expect it to be so. Other wills are at work. We can even consider influences like “environment.” That safety pin experiment would have gone differently if you did it outside on a windy day, because you couldn’t control all the variables.

This is where process comes in. If a process is a system of actions and feedbacks, each of which has intrinsic value without recourse to a goal, then I should 1) make sure that I’ve taken care of the variables within my control, 2) that each has value to me and the family, and 3) that those feedbacks create a larger context of “a family unified in its values,” rather than “a family that will be on time today.” If I do a decent job, one of those values might be punctuality. (Real world experience proves I have no idea how to set up such a system, but my parents did, which is probably why it annoys me so much when people make me late).

What it boils down to is that a skillfully-arranged process is likely to get better results without the need for harmful means-to-an-end when we’re dealing with higher classes, or other units of the same class, i.e. other people. When there are variables outside my control, other wills involved, I can’t direct every micromovement with an act of imagination the way I can when shooting a free throw. That kind of goal-oriented focus is best reserved for individual acts on a windless day.