A preview of what follows to see
if this is your cup of pragmatic tea.
·
The difference between course, heading, and
bearing.
·
The vital importance of course corrections in
physical life and cognitive life.
·
How to test non-fiction for utility.
·
I emphasize, how to test ANY non-fiction book
from physical geography, to the latest super-duper diet to philosophy. It is a
vital time-saving hack to know when to keep a book always on your desk, in your
mind, or when to toss it on the garbage heap.
·
And we end with a mini book-review.
First, let’s give the stage to author
and amateur pilot Rolf Dobelli. This is from his volume The Art of the Good Life.
“You’re sitting on a plane from London to New York. How much of
the time is it sticking to the flight path, do you think? 90 percent of the
time? 80 percent of the time? 70 percent of the time?
The correct answer is never. Sitting beside the window, gazing out
at the edge of the wing, you can watch the jumpy little ailerons—they’re there
to make constant adjustments to the flight path. Thousands of times per second,
the autopilot recalculates the gap between where the plane is and where it
should be and issues corrective instructions.
I’ve often had the pleasure of flying small planes without
autopilot, when it’s my job to carry out these minuscule adjustments. If I
release the joystick even for a second, I drift off course. You’ll recognize
the feeling from driving a car: even on a dead-straight motorway, you can’t
take your hands off the wheel without veering out of your lane and risking an
accident.
Our lives work like a plane or a car. We’d rather they didn’t—that
they ran according to plan, foreseeable and undisturbed. Then we’d only have to
focus on the set-up, the optimal starting point. We’d arrange things perfectly
at the beginning—education, career, love life, family—and reach our goals as
planned. Of course, as I’m sure you know, it doesn’t work like that. Our lives
are exposed to constant turbulence, and we spend much of our time battling
crosswinds and the unforeseen caprices of the weather. Yet we still behave like
naïve fairweather pilots: we overestimate the role of the set-up and
systematically underestimate the role of correction.
Beautifully done, Mr. Dobelli.
Now three definitions.
Course-The
direction we wish to travel.
Heading-
The direction our aircraft, our boat, our car, or we ourselves are facing at the
moment.
Heading is not always the desired direction. Say Mr. Dobelli’s
aircraft, is moving against a crosswind or you and I may be hiking due north
but encounter a downed tree and veer our physical heading due west to navigate around
the tree, but our course-intent and desire is to return to a due north course.
Bearing-
The angle in degrees (clockwise) between North and the direction to the
destination. [We will deal with bearing no more today.]
In day-to-day physical and cognitive navigation we must never lose
sight of our desired course, but be aware that we are making minute heading adjustments
practically moment to moment.
The Importance of Getting It Right From the Start, or Intolerance
to Error
Let’s hand over the stage again to another, this time Antone
Roundy.
“If you're going somewhere and you're off course by just one
degree, after one foot, you'll miss your target by 0.2 inches. Trivial, right?
But what about as you get farther out?
- After
100 yards, you'll be off by 5.2 feet. Not huge, but noticeable.
- After
a mile, you'll be off by 92.2 feet. One degree is starting to make a
difference.
- After
traveling from San Francisco to L.A., you'll be off by 6 miles.
- If you
were trying to get from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., you'd end up on
the other side of Baltimore, 42.6 miles away.
- Traveling
around the globe from Washington, DC, you'd miss by 435 miles and end up
in Boston.
- In a
rocket going to the moon, you'd be 4,169 miles off (nearly twice the
diameter of the moon).
- Going
to the sun, you'd miss by over 1.6 million miles (nearly twice the
diameter of the sun).
- Traveling
to the nearest star, you'd be off course by over 441 billion miles (120
times the distance from the earth to Pluto, or 4,745 times the distance
from Earth to the sun).”
Mr. Roundy used a mere 1-degree
error. But…and I wager you know this in your soul already, most errors are of a
greater margin than 1 degree. Any error-margin greater than one compounds our course
failure exponentially.
Getting things right from the start
and keeping our eyes on course corrections as never-ending heading adjustments steal
attention is, perhaps, the be-all end-all of getting to, well, anywhere.
Testing Books, Philosophies, Creeds,
Assumptions, Fads & Fashions for Utility
We will use a single book to illuminate
the course-correction tool emphasized in bold above.
The Book: Wayfinding: The Science
and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World by M. R. O’Connor.
Confession: The book’s topic is up my alley. It
is also beautifully written, and I’d be a liar if I did not say that I found copious
additional reading/research buried in the source notes but…
Any non-fiction book, lecture,
YouTube commentary, podcasts, anything making claims on
reality should be tested for disconfirmation.
That is, we often simply seek to
confirm our pet topics and issues rather than seek to disconfirm.
For example, we read a book on the
Paleo diet and get all excited and do nothing but read Paleo blogs and Paleo
articles that agree with our diet du jour.
We would be wiser to read/consume
any non-fiction, then ponder if it strikes a little spark of interest in us. If
it does, before we plunge in headfirst, we should seek to disconfirm the new
idea and then weight if we give credence to any disconfirming evidence we may
find.
Why? A mere one degree of error…
Back to the book. Beautifully
written, beautifully argued and…that is always part of the danger of getting lazy
with our disconfirmation. Subjects that we already adore and prose or GIFs, or
podcast voices that lull us into agreed complacency are all the more dangerous
as we fall down on the job of keeping our eyes on constant course correction.
One counter-factual in an entire volume
may not mean the entire book, the entire philosophy, the entire run of TEDTalk lectures
is smoke and mirrors, but…it should make us walk warily.
From our exampled book…
“…nearly every animal that has been
tested thus far demonstrates a capacity to orient to the geomagnetic field.
Carp floating in tubs at fish markets in Prague spontaneously orient themselves
in a north-south axis. So do newts at rest, and dogs when they crouch to relieve
themselves. Horses, cattle, and deer orient their bodies north-south while
grazing, but not if they are under power lines, which disrupt the magnetic
fields. Red foxes most always pounce on mice from the northeast. These
organisms must all have some kind of organelle that functions as a
magneto-receptor, the same way an ear receives sound and an eye receives space.” Pg. 91.
Pretty neat, huh?
Just the sort of practical natural hacks
I crave and backed up with science and a postulate for how it works.
One problem—Almost certainly none
of it is true.
I cannot vouch for carp in fish markets
in Prague but…
·
My
property is flush with newts and I witness no compass directed rest.
·
After
reading this passage I watched my dog carefully over the course of a week, she
is all over the map and all over the compass.
·
I
see horses and cattle weekly—with power lines and without, far more wily-nilly positioning
than this passage would indicate.
·
Deer
feed on my property often, they orient toward possible escape or possible oncoming
threat not some north-south edict.
·
And
we hosted a mother red fox and her three young kits this spring and had ample opportunity
to watch her hunt and teach hunting to the kits. Pouncing was catch-as-catch-can.
So, beautiful prose, a subject I love, the passage before I tipped
my hand that something was hinky sounds like one of those neat “factoid” things
we read and feel smartified, but it is almost certainly all false. [Again, can’t
vouch for the carp.]
This one paragraph being in error does not mean the work is
useless and every other sentence may be a clarion of accuracy but…in a world of
choices and time being finite do I need to spend more time proving errors are
not as wrong as wrong is, or get back on the stick and seek course correction?
In a sense, tossing weak books, weak creeds, weak pet notions is
course correction in and of itself.
Every wrong or “not really right” idea we can toss gets us closer
to a useful heading and a corrected course.
[For techniques, tactics,
and strategies of Rough and Tumble Combat, Old-School Boxing, Mean-Ass
Wrestling, Street-Ready Frontier Scrapping & Indigenous Ability culled from
the historical record see the RAW Subscription Service, or stay on the corral
fence with the other dandified dudes and city-slickers. http://www.extremeselfprotection.com
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