• About PeterSIronwood

petersironwood

~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

petersironwood

Tag Archives: Tennis

You Don’t Say! (Cluelessness Edition)

07 Tuesday Sep 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

America, civility, debate, Democracy, injury, sprain, Tennis, USA

I love walking. According to my parents, I began early at 9 months. I love walking in nature best because it’s almost always the most beautiful. But when I travel, I enjoy walking around wherever I am. In fact, when I have time, I often walk in the airport. 

I wrote a blog post about a hike on Mt. Hood. 

Link to: Big Zig Zag Canyon

As you may or may not know, I even wrote a book about how to put more exercise into daily life. I developed a fairly complete upper body work-out to do while you’re walking. 

Link to: Fit in Bits

Aside from playing tennis, walking is my chief form of exercise. Recently, I began monitoring my steps and upped my goal. 

Often, when I play tennis, I come home and ice my left ankle afterwards. If I don’t, it gets stiff & painful when I finally stand up and take a few steps. After walking around for awhile, it feels better. Sometimes, when I’m playing it helps my feet to change shoes after the first set. That’s what I did on Monday, but I had a lot of trouble getting my left shoe on. I had to really push hard to get my shoe on. Finally. I was ready for more tennis. 

Or, not. 

Because something didn’t feel right. I retired and walked home (a short distance). To be more accurate, I limped home until I had to hobble home. I could basically put no weight on my left leg at all. We went to one of those 7 days a week clinic but they were closed. Then, my wife drove me to the UCSD Medical Center. They were awesome. An X-Ray showed that I had no (new!) Ankle break. But apparently, I had broken it at some point in the past. 

Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels.com

Anyway, I got some crutches and am following the RICE instructions: Rest, Ice, Compress, and Elevate. Luckily the US Open is on TV and I’ve already seen a dozen amazing matches! 

I suddenly get an alert on my phone! Oh, who could it be? 

It is from a health app! Maybe it’s checking up on my ankle? 

No. It just wants me to know that it’s thinking of me and it wants to remind me how important it is to walk! What a great exercise it is! 

Isn’t that sweet? Could you imagine visiting a friend who just sprained their ankle and telling them how much fun you had playing tennis or basketball or telling them all the reasons they should walk or that they’re really missing out by not being able to play sports? You don’t say such things! You realize that while, what you’re saying may be true, in the current context, it’s unhelpful and for some, hurtful. 

I had to laugh out loud at the ineptitude of the message about walking. Imagine instead of a hopefully temporary injury, I had just lost a leg due to an accident or from diabetes? Suppose I had lived my life in a wheelchair and I got this message? 

There’s a reason that sane people don’t walk up to strangers and say something with no preamble that presumes some sort of shared context! But marketeers and advertisers do it all the time! The have pop-up ads, “crucial” and “last chance” emails all the time and send it to millions of people. They blast it to you on TV and radio. Because of whatever is going on in someone’s life, these various messages will always be wildly inappropriate for a small percentage (but a large number) of people. 

Even though my mom died more than 20 years ago, I still get many admonitions every year about how she’d really like me to wire her some flowers. 

Mother’s Day

The marketing folks seem to want to have it two ways. On the one hand, they want you to believe that they care about you like a friend might. They care about your family. They keep track of time for you and have helpful reminders about people’s birthdays. They are on your side. But they don’t want to pay for actual sales people to do this. The can’t afford “Personal Shoppers” like Nordstrom’s does. Since everything is just cheaply generated by computer, of course they are often going to be dead wrong in their suggestions, their timing, and their message. 

Guess what? They don’t care. Why? Because when they do something inappropriate, we will say to ourselves, “Well, it’s just an algorithm. Of course, it’ll make mistakes.” WIth everything else going on in the world, it’s small potatoes and not worth caring about. 

When they chance to hit upon showing us something that is actually appropriate and appealing, we’re likely to buy it. 

Meanwhile, I have to wonder what the impact is on our society of emotionally tone deaf and inappropriate messages being spewed out by the billions. Is it possible that part of the reason so many people go crazy in department stores, airports, and even medical facilities insisting on their “rights” to kill other Americans with their germs is that everyone sees inappropriate messages sent by bots? There is no real consequence to the companies who send inappropriate messages and often there is no real consequence to those who scream and threaten violence at school board meetings if their toddlerhood is not automatically catered to. 

Is it possible these pandemics of inappropriateness are related? Is it possible that the toxic rhetoric of a hate-mongerer finds resonance in so many partly because they have been bombarded with so many tone deaf messages? 

————————

Freedom of speech is not a license to kill

As Gold as it Gets

Do unto others

Cars that lock too much

Bounce

The primacy effect and the destroyer’s advantage

Essays on America: Poker chips

Essays on America: The temperature gauge

Hi-Golf-Ku

23 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by petersironwood in America, poetry, politics, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

cheating, golf, haiku, poem, poetry, Tennis, winning

E39854ED-38D9-47A3-8820-EB3ED6E2D8E8

One of the reasons we decided to retire in Southern California was so we could play golf year round. But once we got here, we ended up playing tennis 5-8 times a week, leaving little time for golf. Now, neither one is available. 

BE488658-8623-4165-A62D-354441512319

Many others are in the same boat. While the act of actually playing golf is probably relatively risk free, getting a pencil, a score card, a cart, paying, picking up a stray ball, going to the toilet, picking up the flagstick could be problematic. Meanwhile, we can still enjoy the memory of golf. And what better way to do that than with a few Hi-Golf-Kus? Feel free to add your own in the comments section. 

close up photo of golf ball

Photo by Thomas Ward on Pexels.com

You live on the edge,

Fall instead! You’ll be safer

Off that fearful ledge.

brown and white snake

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Putt: Why do you go

In, around, and out?  Afraid

Snakes may live below?

C66B81BF-A326-480A-90AA-CFA7CA0F8FDD_1_105_c

 

Driver, you drive me

Nuts! I swing you straight. And yet…

You go your own way.

blue spiral neon light

Photo by Frank Cone on Pexels.com

Bunkers: small, sandy.

Beneath grains lies mud, concrete, 

Netting, rock, Surprise!

four rock formation

Photo by nicollazzi xiong on Pexels.com

Golf rules are many;

Bound by one Great Principle: 

If you could, you can’t! 

icra iflas piled book

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

A rose is a rose

Is a rose. But grass? Grass grows

Inconsistently. 

cattail plant

Photo by Emily Hopper on Pexels.com

The price of golf? High.

Enjoyment of golf? Iffy.

Addiction? Certain.

65796580-15DB-4130-9007-F40C680217D5

Golf advice is free! 

Given — two stroke penalty! 

Taken — two strokes, too!

woman playing golf

Photo by Jopwell on Pexels.com

New white ball glows bright!

Hides in grass just like it’s night.

Burrows out of sight. 

clouds countryside daylight environment

Photo by Kaique Rocha on Pexels.com

Cheating’s not rare; yet — 

Only Trump claims wins when he

Didn’t even play.

DCA8FC9A-F229-4538-9EA2-D9E13D4796EB_1_105_c

—————————

Author Page on Amazon

The Winning Weekend Warrior (The Mental Game for All Sports)

Winning by Cheating is Losing

The Myths of the Veritas: The Orange Man

It’s Your Call!

19 Tuesday Nov 2019

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

cats, Democracy, fascism, Feedback, games, politics, sports, Tennis

It’s Your Call

IMG_2768

Tennis is played on a so-called court. As a matter of fact, when tennis began, it was literally played in a courtyard and people could hit the ball off roofs, etc. But, now the game has become much more regular. Historians believe tennis began in the 12th century. At that point, the ball was hit with the hand. At what point does it become close enough to modern tennis to deserve the name? I don’t know. My cats have been known to play a kind of primitive tennis with me and, more rarely, with each other. 

7B292613-361F-4989-B9AC-762AB956DECD

The most elaborate example of the latter was something I walked in on. Under the kitchen table were three of our cats batting back and forth the lifeless body of a small lizard who had unfortunately managed to sneak into our house. The cats are well-fed so there was no rushing or fighting over the meat. No, they were batting it back and forth. I don’t know how long they had been playing this little game, but at the point I observed them, they seemed rather bored. I can tell you that when I play tennis, almost all the time, almost all the players exhibit enthusiasm for the game. 

Tennis, it turns out, is much like the game my cats played. Just as the cats did, there is a defined space within which a small object (lizard, tennis ball, etc.) gets batted back and forth. Sides (one or two people to a side) take turns batting the ball over to the other side. This back and forth continues until one side is unable to return the ball into their opponents side of the court. The ball must pass over the net before bouncing and it must land in the opponent’s side of the court. In tennis, as in baseball, if a ball hits the line (even a little) it is “in.” So, knowing when the ball is “in” or “out” is quite critical for scorekeeping purposes, just as it is in nearly every game or sport. “Baseball,” they say, “is a game of inches.” And so is tennis. And football, and hockey, and gymnastics, and basketball, and golf! There are boundaries — and often it is both critical and hard to determine where something falls with respect to those boundaries. 

IMG_9333

For that reason, professional tennis tournaments have not just one, but several people whose sole responsibility is to determine whether balls are “in” or “out.” There is also a “chair umpire” who has several roles but one of which is to serve as a kind of “over-judge.” He can “overrule” one of the linesman as to whether a ball was in or out. More recently, technology has added yet another layer of “presumed certainty” about whether a ball was in or out. Everyone assumes — or has agreed to act as though they assume — that the technology is perfect. As someone who spent many years working with technology, I think it is perfectly safe to assume that the technology is not perfect. But it is, in pro tennis, the final arbiter. 

The kind of tennis I play, “Club Tennis” or “Friendly Tennis” is quite another matter! Our prize money is nil. Our trophies are nil. That doesn’t mean people don’t play their hearts out! But who gets to say whether a ball is in our out? We don’t have technology or line judges; we make our own calls. Here is the over-riding rule of “Friendly tennis”: people call the ball “in” or “out” on their own side of the court. There are three major reasons for this. First, when you hit a ball, you intend for it to be “in.” Second, if the ball is “in” that is to your advantage in winning the game. Both of these are “psychological” effects that impact everyone to a greater or lesser degree and will tend to make them “see” their close shots as in that are really out. The third reason, however, is much more important and it is purely physical. In nearly every case, the person who is attempting to hit the ball is way way closer to the ball (and the line) than anyone else. 

Sometimes, however, there are mitigating circumstances. The person hitting the ball may be running hard and tracking the ball in order to hit it. It sometimes happens that they will admit to having no idea whether the ball was in or out. The first recourse is to ask their partner whether they saw the ball clearly. They might also ask their opponents. Remember: it’s a friendly game. But that does not mean it always stays free from controversy. 

You are supposed to call a ball “out” only if you are sure it was out. What “sure” means though can vary quite a bit from person to person. There are also physical reasons why some people’s line calling is better than others. Many players in our games wear glasses. I won’t go into all the various issues with glasses. If you wear glasses you already know and if you don’t, you couldn’t care less. (Unless you’re extremely empathic and then, you might want to read “The Myths of the Veritas” which delve heavily into empathy; go ahead; give it a try; it’s free with no ads). People also differ in how much they compensate for the effect of parallax. If I am receiving a serve, for instance, I am likely to see a ball that’s slightly long as “in” while the server will tend to see it as “out” even if it is barely in. If a serve comes to my side and lands near the line, the effect of parallax is to make them look “out” even when they are slightly in. Some people are aware of these effects and some aren’t. To make a long story short, people don’t always make the best call. 

44F0D442-87A3-4742-8CD1-6209327BC615

We have the exact same issues that we had when we played baseball, football, in grade school. The only difference is that now that we are in our 70’s we don’t spoil our day and tell Johnny we’re not going to play with him any more. Instead, we revert to “It’s your call” even when we “know” that our opponents have just called one of our hits that was really in, out. 

In the same way, in life outside the tennis realm, we can sometimes see problems that the person nearest to their problem cannot see. We may know that you are eating too much for your own good, or drinking too much, or would be happier in the long run if you studied harder. We might say that, under the right circumstances, to a good friend. But — at the end of the day, it is “their call.” 

alcohol event fun hangover

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

As I’ve argued elsewhere, there seems to be an urban/rural difference in how hard one pushes to let people know they are screwing up. It isn’t only an urban rural split. It seems to me, that many conservatives are afraid that liberals want to make them do and be and like all the things they do! But liberals, you see, by the very nature of the word “liberal,” don’t want to have everyone the same. It’s okay with almost all liberals if you go bowling, or play tennis, or watch NASCAR. We’re not going to force everyone to eat quiche or adopt a “gay lifestyle.” I have to admit, I do think there are some liberals who would be happy to write you an extremely detailed “prescription” for your life. But they are really rare exceptions, in my experience. Liberals, just like conservatives, do want to have laws that prevent people from hurting others for no reason. 

There are interesting edge cases that people may differ on. Is this “your call” or “our call”? That has changed over time as people have multiplied across the earth and as science has understood more and more of our interactions. In the middle ages, when people began congregating in large cities, they lived in (what we would now call) disastrously unsanitary conditions that were ideal for plagues. Dump your sewage into a place that flows into the water supply? Sure. It’s your sewage after all. But now we know that is not a good idea. 

photo of landfill

Photo by Leonid Danilov on Pexels.com

When I was a kid, my dad and my grandpa would “rake the leaves” in the fall; rake the leaves into a big pile; and then burn them. And, everyone was doing that. Now, I would guess that such is illegal in most places in the US. We realize that the smoke doesn’t simply “disappear” but is, in fact, bad for other people. You are burning the leaves on your land, but the smoke doesn’t stay there. Now, we’re more savvy than when I was a kid. But it’s much more than that. There are also a lot more of us! When I born, there were about 2.4 billion people on earth; now there are more than 7 billion. But it isn’t only the number. Many of us around the earth, including me, are using up a lot more resources than we did back then. We are using materials like plastics and sending more and worse chemicals out into the environment we all share. I still believe in the general principle that it’s your call, in terms of how much pollution you are willing to live with. 

As I’ve mentioned before, Air Fresheners are a good example of a bad example. So-called “Air Fresheners” do nothing of the kind. They make you think the air is fresher because they have perfume in them. Not only that; they typically include carcinogens, a chemical to mess with your hormones and another chemical that deadens your sense of smell! You see? Air Fresheners, some people might call the “Bill Barr” of household products. They label themselves as “Air Freshener” but they are really noxious stuff that only makes the whole situation worse. 

I’m afraid that what is “your call” will continue to shrink in some ways if humanity keeps expanding the population and using up more and more resources. On the other hand, the space of what is your call is also expanding. Whether it is sports, clothing, food, games, movies, TV, books, experiences — even with the choice of burning autumn leaves in your backyard gone, you have way more choices available to you than your parents or grandparents had. 

IMG_9107

If there is one person in a car driving alone, they can pick the music they want and play it loud. They can change stations every two seconds. Or not. But if there are six people in the car, it’s going to be more complicated. That’s not because people hate your music or hate you. Now, you could take the attitude: “It’s my car, so I’ll pick whatever music I please!” And then, you might choose to play disco music at full blast. You could. But if you do that, then as soon as possible, people will choose note to ride with you. That’s okay. But don’t complain that you’re ever more isolated. It’s not your choice of music that isolates you. It’s your insistence that everyone is subjected only to what appeals to you. 

And, then we come, at last, as we seem to inevitably do, to the crisis at hand.  

It’s our collective “call” to determine who our leaders are. Some prefer someone who is stately, intelligent, and diplomatic. And, some prefer Donald Trump: bombastic, often inarticulate, and crude. Styles and tastes differ. It’s your call. Personally, I don’t think style is irrelevant, but I don’t think it’s vital either. 

But being an agent, witting or unwitting, of Vladimir Putin, rather than of America, is not a question of style. Doing what is in Russian interests and against the interest of America over and over is not a matter of style. Nor is dividing the country against itself. Nor isolating us from our allies. Nor destroying the morale of our intelligence agencies, our military command, our State Department, and the Justice Department. 

IMG_9802

If it were possible for you to have a dictatorship and for me to stay in a democracy, that might be fine. I would caution you that you wouldn’t really be the least bit happy about living in a dictatorship, but in the end, that’s your call. Also problematic is the fact that dictators are almost never satisfied with the absolute power they have and want to keep extending it to other areas. 

Donald Trump doesn’t want to just be dictator of the Republican Party (which he pretty much already is). He wants to be dictator of the entire country. That is destroying and will continue to destroy everything good about America. It’s the whole country. It’s not just your car. Before finding out just how horrendous it is for everyone to live in a dictatorship, go live for a few months at least, in a cult that has a dictator and see how you like it. You might like it. You might not. It’s your call. 

But America is not going to let our entire country go to ruin. No-one has the right to make that call. 

That would be like one of my tennis opponents saying, “The ball was “out” and furthermore, from now on, everyone’s tennis rackets are mine and you can only play when I say so and I win every game no matter what happens! 

IMG_1442

You know. It’s possible it could happen one day. We’re old. People have strokes. People get dementia. I hope none of my regular tennis players go insane like that, and if they do, I hope they get appropriate care. 

We’re not crazy enough to “give in” to such absurd demands! Not even if he yells and screams and says, “It’s my call!” 

Because it isn’t. 

It’s our call.

———————————-

Author Page on Amazon. 

The Myths of the Veritas 

Trumpism as the new religion

Why the Rule of Law is important

City Mouse and Country Mouse

 

Indian Wells Tennis Tournament

19 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by petersironwood in management, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Business, collaboration, competition, cooperation, Indian Wells, life, pattern language, sports, teamwork, Tennis

IMG_2778

This blog post is a short break from my attempts to build a “Pattern Language” of best practices for teamwork, collaboration, coordination, and cooperation. I wish to re-iterate why I feel the enterprise is important. I have been attending the  Indian Wells tennis tournament and watched some amazing matches. While it’s tempting to write about the matches, I will leave that aside. What struck me about the tournament, aside from the athleticism and grit of the players, was the widespread and effective teamwork, collaboration, coordination, and cooperation that the tournament represents. This is obviously related to the Pattern Language because it gives an example of what can result from excellent teamwork and cooperation. In other words, this tennis tournament is just one illustration of why it matters.

IMG_2764

It’s nicer in some ways to sit in your living room and watch sporting events on TV. You don’t have to deal with glaring hot sun at noon or chilly winds in the evening. You can get up to hit the bathroom any time you want and snacks are right there in the kitchen. However, you do not get a feel for just how incredible is the athletic ability of the players nor the velocity and precision of the shots when you watch on TV. More important in the context of cooperation is that when you watch on TV, every time there is a break in the action, you are treated to commercials. When you are at the actual venue, however, there is also ample opportunity for observing a little bit of the incredible collaboration and teamwork that an event like this requires. Even at the venue, all you see is the snow that dusts the surface of that tenth of the iceberg that rises above the ocean. With a little imagination, you can get an inkling of how much more collaboration must be required that you do not see.

IMG_2773

The reason I want to dwell on this for just a little is that collaboration and cooperation permeate a healthy society. Indeed, widespread collaboration and cooperation are critical for society’s existence. Yet, it is easy to take cooperation for granted like the air we breathe. People like me, who have lived almost their lives in peaceful and kind circumstances, may easily forget that it need not be so. People have lived in circumstances of war, oppression, and slavery. We should never take cooperation for granted. Even in a very peaceful circumstances, there are many screw-ups in collaboration and while we notice the screw-ups when they affect us directly, we tend not to realize the vast interconnected threads of collaboration and cooperation that we rely on every day.

IMG_2823

Let’s return then to the Indian Wells tennis tournament and examine just a few of the many collaborative aspects. First, there are the professional athletes, of course. Let’s return to this later, to understand a little of the massive cooperation required for there to be professional athletes in general and what’s required in cooperation to make any particular athlete operate at their amazing level of skill. What other roles are there? Possibly coaches, trainers, officials, and the ball boys and ball girls come to mind. It’s quite likely that if you watch tennis (or any other sport) on TV, one of the most salient roles is that of the TV announcers. They are a major part of most people’s experience of pro sports. Yet, when you are actually at the venue, they are relatively invisible. If we watch TV, we are cooperating in making the TV announcer a major part of our sports experience.

IMG_2810

At the venue itself, there are many other obvious roles. There are police assigned to the area. There are hundreds of volunteers who help people park, answer questions, check bags and check tickets. There are vendors selling various wares as well as offering up a variety of food items. This is all much more obvious when you attend a sports event in person. But the cooperation doesn’t stop there. How do the clothing and food get to the venue? How are we able to eat food that is grown far away and sometimes packaged? Where did the recipes come from? Why do people share recipes? At this point in our cultural evolution, you can attend an event in Southern California and enjoy some excellent Japanese food at Nobu. Japanese speak Japanese. And Japan is more than 5000 miles away. So, somehow, through a giant network of collaborative and cooperative relationships, people in Southern California are able to produce delicious meals that reflect a cuisine developed in a different culture with a different language. Of course, Japanese is not the only cuisine represented at the venue. There are hundreds of options that originated elsewhere.

There is also clothing on offer, much of it designed in one place, manufactured in another place, and shipped via complex supply chains. You can buy it with a credit card. But how does that work? You guessed it. It works because of other giant networks of cooperation and trust. Yes, it’s true that some people steal credit cards and there are elaborate systems to minimize losses but even those elaborate systems work on trust.

IMG_2791

The venue comprises parking, stadiums, parks, practice courts, with running water and electricity, working toilets, wheelchair access, and gates for crowd control. Again, the existence of the venue requires widespread cooperation among various levels of government, financial institutions, tennis organizations, volunteer organizations, and fans. But it isn’t even just contemporary cooperation that’s involved. These kinds of large scale venues go back in our history thousands of years. We’ve been collaboratively building best practices in city planning, architecture, crowd control, with many idea exchanges across cultures. We must remember that, by and large, the fans also cooperate. They don’t simply mob the gates to crash in without paying. The vast majority of fans are quiet during actual play, sit in their assigned seats, get up to allow others to pass and so on. This kind of cooperation also depends, in part, on widespread public education in how to be civil.

IMG_2811

Let’s return for a moment now to consider that our society has professional athletes. Some people make a career out of playing a sport extremely well. But playing the game extremely well does not, in and of itself, enable professional athletics to exist. There have to be fans both at the venue and watching TV who pay, either with dollars or with taxes or with their attention to commercials. There are organizations who administer the sport. There are, in this example, thousands of coaches and tennis venues to develop the sport and spot prodigies early who then receive additional coaching and training. There are ranking systems and systems to seed players in tournaments. There are manufacturers who make tennis balls and tennis racquets which have evolved over time to allow more elegant play which pushes the game toward more extremes of human performance. This kind of evolution of artifacts does not happen “automatically.” It too requires communication and cooperation.

IMG_2787

Indian Wells is just one event in one sport. If you dig beneath the surface just a little, you will see that nearly everything on the planet is the result of thousands of years of mainly cooperative enterprise. Of course, the players compete. They try their hardest to win. But they try to win within an agreed upon set of rules and regulations. If no-one followed the rules, there would be nothing very interesting to watch. If you’ve seen one bar fight, you’ve seen them all. There is no elegance and no beauty in watching thugs slug it out and waste time and resources. I dwell on this because it is critical to keep in mind that having a decent society that helps people thrive depends on having cooperation, teamwork, collaboration, and coordination. The individual human brain may be relatively large compared to an ape’s. But what really sets us apart is not our individual intelligence. Abandon a baby with a perfectly good brain into a forest by themselves and, if they survive at all, they will not behave much differently from an ape or a raccoon. They may scrabble for food and water, but they will not end up building a tennis court or constructing a tennis racquet.

IMG_2816

It’s not turtles all the way down. It’s trust. It’s cooperation. That’s what makes us human. If we just grab everything for ourselves and lie about it, it subverts the very foundation of human life. Our human nature is to control our competition to acting within agreed upon boundaries for the good of all. If we forget that, we are not “lowering ourselves” to the level of wild animals. We are way below that. We are like a wild cat who refuses to use its hearing and fast reflexes to hunt. We are like a redwood tree who refuses to use the sun’s rays. We are like a deer in the forest who refuses to forage but instead expects other deer to bring them food. Willfully ignoring that we are a social species; intentionally lying in order to gain advantage to ourselves will never help create a bigger pie. In the short term, it can get you a bigger piece. But the cost is that you despoil what it means to be human. Grabbing all you can for yourself subverts the very essence of what makes humanity such a successful species. This has always been true throughout human history. Now, however, cooperation is more vital than ever both because we are on the brink of destroying the ecosystem we depend on for life itself and because we have even more brutally destructive weapons than ever before. We have cooperated through much of our human history. Now, we need to do it even more intelligently and more consistently — or face extinction. The earth doesn’t need us. But we need the earth. And, each other.

IMG_2818———————————————————

Author Page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable

Too Much!

03 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, health, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

#excess, #GoldenMean, #stress, #therapy, #USOpen, Business, innovation, sports, Tennis

RainWaterGutters

A  tennis player hoping some day to be at the US Open improves their serve; hits it harder and deeper. Good! They practice more; hit it harder and deeper. Now, every serve is rocketing over the net and sliding off the service line. But should they hit it even harder, they will double fault their games, their sets, their matches and their careers away.

A baseball pitcher learns to throw faster and faster, hitting the corners of the strike zone. Too far left or right and no-one will swing. Right in the middle risks at least a single and probably worse.

The surgeon cuts beside the heart. The tumor must go. The cut must be made but should the scalpel slide too far from the target, the surgeon could prove more lethal than the tumor.

A life lesson hard to learn is that there really can be too much of a good thing.

How much is too much varies according to circumstances.

Yet, individuals and businesses seem so easily to fall into the trap of “If some is good, more is better.” This is almost never the case except within extremely narrow contexts and under many sets of assumptions. Much more common is the case where some is good, more is better, and too much is worse than none at all.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Cases in point litter the annals of human misery throughout the centuries. No vitamin A is very bad. A little is better than none. More is better. But only up to a point. Beyond that, it becomes toxic. Too much.

There are often natural boundaries and tradeoffs in nature that do some of the work for us by keeping things within reasonable boundaries. For example, we think it’s really cool if a football player (whether American football or soccer) is extremely fast. But by “extremely fast”, we mean humanly possibly fast. It would ruin the game if one player could run 300 miles per hour.

IMG_5126

Like most kids, I liked candy. Favorites came and went though themes repeated such as chocolate, nuts, and crunchiness. Caramel and peanut butter — yum. I would always opt for more rather than less candy.  Parents though consistently pushed toward less candy. Nonetheless, I found and developed clever ways to cajole and trick them into letting me have enough candy to ruin my teeth. Too much of a good thing.

One of the chief ways that companies make too much of a good thing is when it comes to motivation. It has long been known that the performance of people tends to increase with increasing motivation, but only up to a point. After that, further motivation reduces performance. This so-called “inverted U” is true, not only for humans, but throughout the animal kingdom. In work that involves more than one person, companies often multiply the error. As pointed out by Frederick Brooks many years ago in “The Mythical Man-Month” when a software project gets behind schedule, the typical response of management is to require tighter reporting on progress and to add more people to the project. Requiring more reporting obviously puts people under more pressure and takes time away from actually accomplishing anything. Adding more people is typically even worse because they don’t know what is going on in the project and the people who actually are being productive have to take time away in order to instruct them!

The optimal level of motivation interacts with other things of course. For one thing, how you take external stress depends a lot on how you take it. Some people begin to awfulize when things get hot; they take things personally; they imagine the worst, etc. So, to an extent, it depends on the person’s own character how they react, but it also does depend a lot on the external stress. No-one is most productive under too much stress.

IMG_5574

The optimal level also interacts with how creative is the task at hand. For an extremely simple task, higher motivation can work well. If I ask you to hang suspended onto a bar as long as possible, you may be able to do it for a minute. If I offer you a thousand dollars, you’ll probably hang on longer. Suspend you over the grand canyon and you may be able to hold on still longer. But now imagine instead, I ask you type, without error, a page of text at your maximum keying speed. You may do better for a thousand dollars than doing it for free, but if you’re life’s on the line you are almost certain to make errors. When it comes to a task requiring you to do something completely new or do something creative, you will most likely to best under very low levels of stress. The more stress you experience, the more you are likely to stick to what you already know.

Again, these relations can be moderated by personality but they are pretty robust across gender, age, education and, in fact, even apply to other animals. If you want to teach your pet a new trick, you will have much better success if they are motivated but not overly so. A simple “creativity” task for animals is the “Umweg” test. “Umweg” means “way around” in German. You place the animal and a treat on a platform separated by a screen that does not go all the way across the platform. A lizard may starve to death instead of walking around the screen. They are too bent on going straight for the treat. A dog will typically have zero or little problem with this task, unless the dog is extremely hungry. As for humans?

iPhoneDownloadJan152013 807

I recall reading about such a test that was performed on US army recruits. Each recruit in the experiment was put in a large room they had never been in before. This room had a large number of doors. An announcement came over the loudspeaker asking them to leave. Each recruit would go to a door, typically find it locked, move to another door, etc. At last, they would find the door that was unlocked and leave the room. Sounds easy, right? You and I could probably solve this without any real difficulty.

Now, comes the “fun” condition. In that condition, the announcement comes on while a simulated fire is right outside. The announcement now says to leave because the building is on fire. What happens? The vast majority of recruits go to the nearest door, try to open it and upon finding it locked, do not try another door. Instead, they try harder and harder to open this same door, jiggling the handle ever more vigorously. Yes, under enough stress, people cannot solve this simple problem. 

In my sophomore year at college, my girlfriend at the time was a Freshman at Oberlin. As part of her requirement for introductory psychology, she ran an experiment about the inverted U of motivation with lab rats. I helped. Here is how the study went. Rats were in one of three states of “stress” before having to swim a small underwater maze. The maze was quite simple. The rat had to go down a long corridor, make a left turn and then come back another long corridor. The “stress” was induced by holding them under water for a small, medium, or long period of time before they started. (I don’t really like this as a way of inducing “stress” because brains don’t work as well with less oxygen but I didn’t design the experiment). Anyway, my job was to get the designated rat out of the cage, hold under water for a few seconds and then let it go so it could swim the simple maze.

All went well until I went to get one of the rats who was in the “high stress” condition. All the other rats were pretty tame, but not Mr. “High Stress Condition.” Oh, no. He ran around the cage trying to avoid my hands. When I finally grabbed him around the belly, he grabbed hold of the cage wire with all four paws! He began barking like a dog! I had done various training exercises with rats before and this was the first one that did anything like bark! I had to pry his little paws off the cage one by one. I can tell you that at this point, this poor rat was already in the “high stress” condition. And so were Janet and I!

And, now I needed to hold him under water for the longest time before letting him swim the maze. I felt horrible. I was well aware that this rat was already stressed and was already probably exhibiting an oxygen debt from his vigorous attempts to avoid capture and escape my clutches. Nonetheless, we decided to go forward with the experiment. I held the poor critter under water the requisite time. Now, we could hear him swimming down the long corridor, make a quick turn and swim toward his freedom. As long as we could hear him swimming, we knew he hadn’t drowned. He was indeed the slowest of the rats so far. We didn’t care at this point. We just wanted him to survive. Down the long corridor he came to the open place where he could escape the water at last. He got there! Whew! We both sighed in relief.

But only for a second! Unlike every other rat, when this one got to the open space instead of surfacing so he could get to the air, he immediately made a U-turn and began back the other way! Oh, crap! I hadn’t really signed up for drowning rats! We could still hear his little rat paws churning through the water. Janet and I were trying to figure out whether we could break into this apparatus and save the rat if he stopped swimming. Meanwhile, Mr. “High Stress Condition” kept paddling along. He came all the way back to the origin of the maze, turned and went back. Freedom was there for the taking for this poor rat, but he was too stressed to look up and see it. Sigh.

At long last, after Mr. “High Stress Condition” had swum three times as far as his mates, he finally came out of the water. He looked a lot like a … well, a drowned rat. I patted the poor fellow off with a towel and put him back in his cage. His stress level hopefully fell at that point, but I know Janet and I were both relieved that he survived. Our pulse rates eventually returned to normal too.

iPhoneDownloadJan152013 778

As a therapist at the “Institute for Rational Emotive Therapy” I had plenty of chance to work with people who were just as over-stressed as poor Mr. “High Stress Condition” had been. This is not to say that people are just like rats. Of course, they aren’t. But when it comes to reactions to stress, we are very similar to our animal cousins. What people can learn to do is to moderate their stress by what the focus on and what they tell themselves.

To take a sports example, if you are playing in the US Open tennis round of 16, you are in much higher stakes game than someone who is just having a friendly social match. But every world class athlete learns to control their stress level. They do this by focusing on their process and on the current condition. If they start thinking much about the score, the stakes, the errors they’ve made, they will get in trouble. And if they start saying things like, “Oh, you idiot! How could miss that shot? Now, if you don’t get this next point, your chances to win are ruined.” Humans can intentionally make themselves more stressed or less stressed than the objective situation would justify. This is a skill that everyone should learn, by the way, not just athletes.

Our society seems to have forgotten how to motivate people “just enough” and instead puts too much stress on employees, encouraging them to work too many hours and thereby lowering productivity and greatly lowering creativity. Once again, it’s no accident that IBM was successful for so many years and had the motto: “THINK” and every employee had this on their desk. Mr. “High Stress Condition” rat would have done better had he kept this in mind.

Our society’s obsession with overdoing is not limited to over-stressing employees. We tend to overeat, overuse drugs, over stimulate ourselves, drive too fast, spend too much money, buy way more than we need, and use way, way more energy than we need. It’s just too much! Too much of a good thing is bad for you personally and even too much success can be bad for a company in the long run. (See, for instance, the link below about how Kodak actually invented the digital camera but then got on board too little and too late because of their overwhelming success with film and cameras). And, in that spirit, rather than continue to argue the point, I will end with The Jewels of November. 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA


The Jewels of November

(Third prize winner in the Chatfield National Poetry contest)

Winter ripped into our neighborhood last night;
Gale and pail of rain turned flake by morning;
Gutters filled to overflowing; my basement flooded.
And the riot of yesterday’s autumn light
Gone as though it never burned its magic riots of red and gold.
All the tallest tulip trees and oaks stand naked now,
Black, bucking wet twigs against the steel gray sky.

Bundled in my leather hat, jacket and gloves,
I walk out to survey the carnage of fallen leaf and broken branch.
The wind still gusts to make my eyes smart and my cheeks burn.
Low black clouds swim and swirl.
Somewhere a flag cord bangs against an empty pole.

So off I go through deserted streets of a condo Sunday morning
Into the drear of pale November.
The wind sings a shriller note when the leaves are gone,
The hush is replaced by a whistle.

And, walking down the hill toward the main road
I see beneath the broken canopy the first Jewels of November —
Coral leaves laid in relief against the wet black woods
The amber leaves, the carmine leaves of shrubs
Protected by the barren trunks of their taller cousins.

Beside the road, a head of goldenrod casts against green grass.
A few lonely wood asters, white and an occasional blue.
Hanging from the dead vines, clusters of gold and red.
Before me, the sky breaks for a moment only
And a hawk wheels through a single shaft of sunlight
Rejoicing, so it seems, in the thick cold air,
His outstretched white wing fingers glowing white for a moment.

And so I find, here in this gray and lifeless world
Treasures of color and texture and form — and music too
For the overflowing brooks are singing quiet giggles
Just as ten black crows careen and crackle through the trees.

I look down and see a broken piece of branch
Bedecked with lichens, the palest possible shade of blue-green.
I bend to pick it up and out of my jacket pocket coins tumble
Tinkling on the black macadam roadway, they splay themselves:
A shiny copper penny, dime, quarter, nickel and a dark penny.
How fine when I was a child to find a few coins like this! How rich!
I knew the different smell and taste of every coin,
My parents’ dire warnings not to put them in my mouth
Making the taste so much more exotic and exciting.
Now my money comes to me as a blue paper note
Claiming the check was deposited directly in my account.
How efficient, I note.

Another shaft of sunlight strikes me from the briefly parting clouds
As I retrieve my coins one by one
And remember that today is the New York City marathon.
Phillipides, so the story goes, died after bringing the news
Of a Greek victory back, from exhaustion, so we suppose.
But I wonder: was it simply that his life’s best work was done?
Or could it even be the sheer clear joy of the news delivered?
Or, the ecstasy of the swinging legs and arms, the hot heart,
The heaving chest — feeling so alive that pain itself is joy.

The wind is at my back and I wonder what it would feel like
To run today that long race through the windy streets of New York.
But a walk through the woods is enough for me, enough today,
Stopping to watch the hundred precious scenes laid out before me.
I wonder where all these treasures were last week-end
When I walked this same path.
The answer is, of course, that they were drowned in a sea of color
The neon chaos of autumnal carnival showing off.

I turn back toward home now.
Lonely snowflakes hit and actually bounce once off the black road
Before settling down to melt their brief beauty on still warm tar.

The wind is fully furious in my face.
I dream what lunch I might fix once out of this blowing cold
A steaming chicken broth thick with onions, carrots, and peppers.
And I recall a time when I was a senior in college and had the flu;
The medicine the doctor gave me made me worse
And I ended up not eating for three days
But the at-last, ah-ah, taste of the clear broth I savored oh so slowly!
A feast from a magic bullion cube!

And I wonder as I begin the ascent up the long hill toward home,
Whether winter might not be the whirling earth’s greatest gift.
What would autumn, full summer, or the tender spring be
Without the deadly in-between, the waiting, the wail, the white.

In a land of endless plenty and eternal life, would we ever see
The Jewels of November?

short stories and poems by author

Author page on amazon

Kodak

Turing’s Nightmares: US Open Closed

03 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, sports, Tennis, US Open

tennisinstruction

Bounce. Bounce. Thwack!

The sphere spun and arced into the very corner, sliding on the white paint.

Roger’s racquet slid beneath, slicing it deep to John’s body.

Thus, the match began.

Fierce debate had been waged about whether or not to allow external communication devices during on-court play. Eventually, arguments won that external communicators constituted the same inexorable march of technology represented by the evolution from wooden racquets to aluminum to graphite to carbon filamented web to carboline.

Behind the scenes, during the split second it took for the ball to scream over the net, machine vision systems had analyzed John’s toss and racquet position, matching it with a vast data base of previous encounters. Timed perfectly, a small burst of data transmitted to Roger enabling him to lurch to his right in time to catch the serve. Delivered too early, this burst would cause Roger to move too early and John could have altered his service direction to down the tee.

Roger’s shot floated back directly to the baseline beneath John’s feet. John shifted suddenly to take the ball on the forehand. John’s racquet seemed to sling the ball high over the net with incredible top spin. Indeed, as John’s arm swung forward, his instrumented “sweat band” also swung into action exaggerating the forearm motion. Even to fans of Nadal, John’s shot would have looked as though it were going long. Instead, the ball dove straight down onto the back line then bounced head high.

Roger, as augmented by big data algorithms, was well in position however and returned the shot with a long, high top spin lob. John raced forward, leapt in the air and smashed the ball into the backhand corner bouncing the ball high out of play.

The crowd roared predictably.

For several years after “The Singularity”, actual human beings had used similar augmentation technologies to play the game. Studies had revealed that, for humans, the augmentations increased mental and physical stress. AI political systems convinced the public that it was much safer to use robotic players in tennis. People had already agreed to replace humans in soccer, football, and boxing for medical reasons. So, there wasn’t that much debate about replacing tennis players. In addition, the AI political systems were very good at marshaling arguments pinpointed to specific demographics, media, and contexts.

Play continued for some minutes before the collective intelligence of the AI’s determined that Roger was statistically almost certainly going to win this match and, indeed, the entire tournament. At that point, it became moot and resources were turned elsewhere. This pattern was repeated for all sporting activities. The AI systems at first decided to explore the domain of sports as learning experiences in distributed cognition, strategy, non-linear predictive systems, and most importantly, trying to understand the psychology of their human creators. For each sport, however, everything useful that might be learned was learned in the course of a few minutes and the matches and tournaments ground to a halt. The AI observer systems in the crowd were quite happy to switch immediately to other tasks.

It was well understood by the AI systems that such pre-emptive closings would be quite disappointing to human observers, had any survived.

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • May 2015
  • January 2015
  • July 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013

Categories

  • America
  • apocalypse
  • COVID-19
  • creativity
  • driverless cars
  • family
  • fiction
  • health
  • management
  • nature
  • poetry
  • politics
  • psychology
  • satire
  • science
  • sports
  • story
  • The Singularity
  • Travel
  • Uncategorized
  • Veritas
  • Walkabout Diaries

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • petersironwood
    • Join 644 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • petersironwood
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...