I had the opportunity to serve as a local support for an incredibly talented and thoughtful 15 year old pianist who traveled from Toronto with his mother. Because he spent the vast majority of his time here in his practice room honing his performance, that turned out to be a very easy job, and because he and his mother are both friendly and interesting people, it was a very pleasant one as well. Best of all, I got to see him perform several times because he wound up advancing all the way to the final round (and winning his age group).

The first round consisted of solo repertoire performances of very advanced pieces (think Rachmaninoff, Chopin, etc). His solo performance included a solo piano arrangement of Stravinsky’s “Infernal Dance” from The Firebird. If you are familiar with that piece, you can imagine the technical challenges that a piano arrangement of it would create.

The second round involved chamber performances and a master class with Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the final round involved performing a concerto movement with the Canton Symphony Orchestra (my guy chose Grieg’s iconic A minor and absolutely killed it).

Being exposed to such amazing young musicians has definitely been an inspiration for me. These young folks are among the best in the world at what they do, and such excellence, while somewhat intimidating, can be very motivating. Seeing an 15 year old flawlessly perform a piece that I could spend months practicing and still struggle through—wow.

He shared with me that he doesn’t have experience with improvisation and doesn’t feel like he will ever have enough knowledge of music theory to be able to improvise, so while he is a far better classical pianist than I will ever be, there is a musical skill that I have that he will probably never acquire.

But, true as that is, I (age 56.849) am not at the level as a jazz pianist that he (age 15) is as a classical pianist. Some might find that discouraging. Perhaps I would be discouraged if I had spent my life practicing his level of focus and intensity without achieving his level of excellence.

But I didn’t throw myself into jazz piano (or anything) the way he has with classical. I futzed around with guitar, composing, production, writing indie-pop songs, playing in cover bands, playing in jam bands, playing in musical theatre productions, and generally dabbled in many different arenas of musicalization. Oh yeah, and math.

So I don’t come down hard on myself for not having that kind of world-class skill. Hopefully what I lack in depth I make up for in breadth.

Also, regardless of what else I am and am not skilled at, I am really good at experiencing joy in the act of making music. And I have found many different contexts for doing so. So again, no regrets.

That being said, in the wake of this experience, and in preparing for my first public gig in 7 years, I feel a need to increase the intensity of focus on piano performance at this moment in my life. This entails a deeper level of intention in my time practicing, and saying “not at this moment” to other musical projects that might otherwise seem very appealing.

There is a time for side quests, and a time for, uh, not side quests.

So here is a demo version I recorded earlier this week with a looping drum track1 and bass played view MIDI keyboard.

This is an abbreviated version (clocking in at 5 1/2 minutes) because in performance drummer and bass player would take solos but I really like this piece in a context that allows it to breathe. Not a perfect performance by any means but it shows the potential for this piece in a jazz context.

As I gear up towards my trio gig in October, I’ll share other demos of pieces that are going to debut that night.

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Balancing is dynamic. The field of external forces constantly shifts its action on us and what worked minutes ago may not work now. Ever since I found out I have low bone density, I’ve worked to improve physical balance. What I’ve learned about my body is that it is never still. Balance is not about remaining static, it’s about responding and adjusting when balance begins to fail.

There is a certain compromise required between firmness and adaptability. When you’re standing on one foot (or two feet in a moving vehicle), it’s good to keep your core engaged. It reduces the small involuntary movements that make balance challenging. At the same time, you have to prepare to move extremities to counter balance when you start to wobble.

When we try to remain completely still, we fail. Each breath subtly alters our center of gravity, as does our blood as it circulates in discrete steps with each beat of our heart. The contents of our gut move (gradually, one hopes) along their twisting and asymmetrical path through our body. We must respond with constant minor adjustments or down we go. When we panic, we lurch, moving too much, which is as bad as not moving enough; either way we begin to fall.

Balance is itself a balancing act between firmness and flexibility.

Balance in Life

Perhaps balance in living is similar. We must be prepared to adjust in response to each moment but we need to have a firm core of values that changes very little.

Our hands and fingers, being further from our core but still connected to it, are like our actions and decisions, which change as we do and as the world changes around us. Still connected to our core, but most useful when fluid and adaptive.

The challenge is that our core values sometimes generate competing instincts: the instincts of seeking individual fulfillment and working to remedy that which is broken in the world are sometimes aligned and sometimes at odds, and can both stem from the same core principles. The art of living is built in part around recognizing competing instincts in our mindset and knowing how to moderate between them dynamically.

I wish I was better at doing this.

Balance in Motion

Balance is hard enough when the only thing changing is you. But we live in a world in which oscillations (climate, political environment, etc.) seem to be both more frequent and more severe. All this at a time when the pace of technological change is accelerating. One year now brings more change than centuries would have at earlier points in recorded history.

The species that evolved to cope with change over the millenia that the smooth line comprises will understandably struggle to cope with the change over the last hundred or so years that the volatile half of the line comprises.

So if you are feeling unsettled by the rapid and massive impact of AI, the changes in weather patterns, the increasing political polarization and radicalization, eroding of institutional bulwarks, etc., then cut yourself some slack. It’s hard to stay balanced on this ride.

You may lose your balance before you can regain it. Let your tactics, goals and beliefs about the world change as is warranted but engage that core set of values to hold it together.

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1. deciding on aspirational values (things that you want to see more/less of in the world)

2. contemplating how your actions or decisions impact those values.

In this essay, I’ll unpack my thinking on both of those steps and discuss two different examples where this kind of thought process is helpful:

1. Ethical consumer behavior

2. Challenging social issues

What kind of world do you want?

In the previous essay, I created a list that included the following types of “good” stuff (in no particular order):

• Joy

• Loyalty

• Providence

• Honesty

• Beauty

• Liberty

• Kindness

• Meaning

• Rule of Law

• Fairness/Justice

• Reverence for life

and the following “bad” stuff:

• Hate

• Pain

• Violence

• Enslavement

• Hunger

• Loneliness

The basic question that I am answering in creating those lists is “What kind of world do I want to create for myself and all other sentient beings?” In the Jewish tradition, we have a concept of social justice known as “Tikkun Olam”, which translates to “repairing the world”. This requires us to understand what we believe to be broken and what we believe the world needs more of.

Maybe your list looks like mine, maybe it doesn’t. In creating your list, maybe try thinking about things that sadden you the most about the world around you, as well as the things that give you the most hope and inspiration.

The important thing, in my opinion, is that you have a list as opposed to a single overarching value. Absolutism is fragile: when you place all of your moral investment into one basic principle, two dangers exist:

1. you willfully ignore that which challenges your absolutism;

2. when your absolutism is challenged in a way that you cannot avoid, you break.1

I also think it’s worth reiterating that this is not just what you want for yourself but for the world around you. For those who are familiar with Kant, the idea is that your values are global.2

Remember though…

…not all values are created equal

Have more than one ultimate value doesn’t mean that you have to put the same amount of weight on each of them. It is natural to value something above all others but that doesn’t mean that you should value it exclusively.

This is where it helps to have some sort of ranking. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a force rank of 1 to n; it can be a categorization of “greater” and “lesser” values. For example, from my list above, my greater values would probably be providence (i.e. everyone having food and shelter), liberty, fairness/justice, and reverence for life.

Lesser (but still important) values would be joy, honesty, beauty, loyalty, kindness, meaning and rule of law.

This hierarchy helps us to think through moral quandaries. For example, during WWII, courageous citizens under Nazi rule violated the rule of law and used deception to shelter and feed Jews, gays, Romany, etc. who would otherwise have been enslaved or sent to the death camps. For me, this was entirely ethical, and my hierarchy of values helps to inform this position: {liberty, reverence for life} > {honesty, rule of law}.

How to think about impact

This is probably the hardest part of assessing our actions, particularly in a world that is as interconnected as ours is. For most of human history, it would be hard to imagine the actions of any human being having impact on people living on other continents but today, our purchasing decisions as consumers impact the global environment, labor conditions in other countries, and conditions for future generations. Such remote impact would have been unheard a few hundred years ago.

Impacts are not only remote but complex. For example, purchasing organic produce may be better for the local water table where it is grown but if it’s shipped across the country, its emissions footprint may make it a worse overall option than a locally grown product that isn’t organic.3

I point out these challenges not to create analysis paralysis, or to induce a sense of futility about ethical thinking, but to illustrate the unavoidable reality that we may not always be certain that we are doing the right thing and that’s ok.

Better to entertain reasonable doubts about being right than to fool ourselves into feeling certain. Where things get complex, it’s important to try to come to an answer but we must always ask ourselves “What if I’m wrong?”

In the ethical sphere, accounting for impact of our actions doesn’t have to be perfect, and it doesn’t have to add up all potential minutiae of downstream impacts. But it does require us to execute some due diligence around the probable and major consequences.

The challenge is in how we compare impacts across different categories of our values. For example, if I work in a restaurant kitchen and every night I sneak a free meal out the back door to a person who lives on the street and has no money to buy food, I am having a favorable impact on providence.

However, I am also stealing this food from my employer, so there is a detriment to rule of law, as well as honesty. How does this weigh against the good that I am doing to relieve someone’s hunger?

Perhaps the answer lies in the amount of food I’m “Robin Hood-ing” relative to what would meaningfully impact the owner’s livelihood. It may also be important to consider how critical the food I am stealing is to the recipient, relative to other options, and whether I am in a position to compensate the restaurant for the food.

Considering impact in consumer spending is sometimes a no-brainer for me: if Mike Lindell tries to sell me a pillow, I don’t really care how comfortable it is, it’s going to be a hard pass for me. It’s the companies that do some good in the world but also may support or enable things that are not so good that warrant deeper consideration.

For example, Apple has exploitative aspects within their supply chain. But their technology also enables me to send money instantly to people around the world (providence), create music that can be shared quickly and broadly (beauty, meaning), more effectively advocate for causes I support (justice), etc. And I, perhaps naively, also believe that Apple is more committed to online privacy than many of their competitors.

The other consideration is that I am not likely to find a more ethical market alternative that provides the same capabilities and function as my Apple products. So if I am uncomfortable with the ethics of their products, the choice is not to switch loyalties but to renounce the category of technology that such companies provide.

The bottom line for me on Apple is that I am uncertain about the ultimate ethical value of my use of their products. But I believe an ethical approach to life requires me to ask two questions:

1. What line, if crossed, would cause me to renounce my use of their products?

2. What choices would I have to make if I did renounce their products?

I also want to point out that not everything needs to be an all-or-nothing situation. If there are aspects of Apple’s corporate citizenship that make me uncertain of their overall ethical value, I can make many incremental decisions that reduce the degree to which I rely on them: less frequent replacing of devices, less reliance on their accessories/peripherals, using a DAW other than Logic Pro, etc. 4

Navigating Disagreement

There are certain social issues that seem to resist what I would call “mainstream ethical consensus”, where trend doesn’t suggest a progression towards growing societal agreement. For example, what many people consider a legitimate exercise of reproductive freedom, many others consider to be murder.

My thought process is not set up to resolve such issues but I do think it provides a basis for healthier conversations among those who disagree, as well as for reflection by people who may be supportive of reproductive rights (RR) with certain limitations, or people who are generally opposed to RR but allow for certain exceptions.

There is a temptation to assume that people who disagree with us on these types of issues do so for the worst possible reasons, that they care nothing about the values we hold most dear. The reality is almost never that simple.

For example, people who are opposed to RR will accuse those who support it of having no reverence for human life. Clearly, though, many supporters of RR are also very passionate about other issues that indicate reverence for human life, so it would be more fair to assume that their views are driven by the degree to which they value liberty.

On the other side, people who support RR will accuse those who oppose it of having no reverence for liberty vis a vis a woman’s bodily autonomy. But many who oppose RR also are in favor of allowing mothers to have more liberty in how they raise their children.

It’s tempting to see these seeming contradictions as examples of the hypocrisy of the other side but I believe that what is revealed is really the complexity of the inputs to our ethical intuition, and the diverse ways we rank those inputs.

If we see the other side of an issue as being the outcome of a different ranking of values that we all share, our disagreements may not vanish but our ability to discuss them productively increases. It is much more difficult to have productive conversations if we believe others hold mutually exclusive values.

It is also good to focus on values that are held in common in order to highlight that areas of disagreement are not always a difference in values. In the case of RR, many on both sides clearly value human life as well as liberty, but differ with respect to assumptions about what constitutes human life and how to balance protecting bodily autonomy with protecting human life.

Building Trust in Intuition

I have suggested that intuition is valuable. But I acknowledge that it is also untrustworthy and biased. How can both of these statements be true?

Intuition, though flawed, can still be useful because biases that make it untrustworthy tend to be predictable, and if we can predict them, we can account for them in how we use our intuition.

For example, I have found that it is more likely that my intuition will lead me to justify what I already have decided and less likely that it will lead me to challenge it. I suppose this is akin to “confirmation bias”.

I may not be able to rewire my intuition, but I can use rationality to challenge my intuition in spots where I know it is most likely to deceive me.

For example, if there is a company whose product makes my life very convenient, I predict that my unfettered intuition is more likely to lead me to justify its use than to question its use. This should lead me to apply more scrutiny to ethical decisions I make when the inconvenience or other costs of doing the right thing may be high.

In predictive modeling, a biased model isn’t useless unless you ignore the bias. The same is true of intuition. So how do we do this in the ethical realm? By working to understand the most common cognitive biases and questioning ourselves in situations where they are likely to arise.

One of the most valuable questions in applying intuition to the ethical realm is:

“Is my intuition validating or challenging the easier path?”

If it is validating the easier path, it may or may not be wrong but it is certainly worth pushing back on ourselves a bit before moving forward. The voice that says

“I think I can justify this”

is not the same as the voice that says

“This choice doesn’t feel right”.

Learning to hear the difference is key.

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I take an agnostic view with respect to whether moral truth is a property of reality or a human construct, but in practice, I try to live as if moral truth is a real thing. My view of morality resembles my view of free will; I don’t quite understand how to live without assuming both are real and I also don’t quite understand how to confidently justify a belief in either.

Still, I would prefer to live in a world in which people think carefully about whether or not their actions are ethical. So I do try to think about the “shoulds” and “oughts” of life, but in a pluralistic sense, considering multiple ethical frameworks, balanced by intuition.

This essay is the first of two reflecting my approach to balancing rational thinking and intuition in trying to figure out how to be a good egg. It lays out the general challenge and the basic mental approach that makes sense to me.

The second essay will suggest some mental exercises and questions to keep the subjectivity from going off the rails, and walk through a couple of examples.

The problem: theory isn’t enough

Moral theories developed from very basic assumptions about reality, using human reason, are highly valuable tools in trying to live an ethical life but I find it difficult to imagine that the application of such a system can ever be objective. In practice, intuition and subjectivity are going to leak into the process whether we admit it or not. Is intuition fallible? Yes. Is it necessary? Also yes.

Regardless of the logic underpinning a theory, even the most good faith application will necessarily entail bias and subjective judgment. When the output of that process points to an action that feels patently wrong to us, is it such a bad idea to question that output, or to consider other soundly reasoned moral frameworks as points of triangulation?

Statisticians are very comfortable with the idea that even if their most robust models are only approximations of the real world phenomena they are trying to describe, there many situations in which we are better off with an approximate model than no model at all. Moreover, two useful models that don’t always concur are more useful than either of them alone.

There are clearly lots of dangers in subjectivity: lots of room for rationalization, lots of room for self-justification. But there is also a difference between the tone of the inner voice that says “this feels wrong” and the voice that says “I think I can find a way to justify this”. Part of moral discernment is having the wisdom and self-awareness to recognize and scrutinize that difference.1

A framework upon which to hang my intuition

Intuition is clearly important in trying to discern right action from wrong action but is it enough to just trust to intuition without applying some type of framework? Probably not, given the extremely subtle ways our brains have of deceiving us with cognitive biases and self-justification.

Most of my day-to-day ethical decisions are fairly obvious, as I assume are those of most of us. Given the opportunity to rob someone, don’t. Given the opportunity to help a friend in need, do. And so forth.

It is with ethical questions where public consensus doesn’t easily emerge that the value of a moral framework becomes apparent. My thought process is something of a hybrid between a principle-based approach2 (e.g. act in accordance with principles that you think should be universal) and the results-oriented approach of utilitarians3 (i.e. do whatever has the most benefit to overall happiness).

It is deliberately not well-defined and requires intuition and self-reflection. It doesn’t produce automatic agreement but it provides a basis upon which to better understand and discuss differences of opinion.

Step 1: Decide upon your values.

By this, I mean, figure out what kind of world you want to live in and figure out what that world should have more/less of, all else being equal4. This is sort of like applying Kant at the strategic rather than tactical level. For example, as a first pass at determining my values, I’d prefer a world with more of the following flavors:

• Joy

• Loyalty

• Providence

• Honesty

• Beauty

• Liberty

• Kindness

• Meaning

• Rule of Law

• Fairness/Justice

• Reverence for life

and a world with less of the following:

• Hate

• Pain

• Violence

• Enslavement

• Hunger

• Loneliness

Some of these categories overlap, so perhaps I could shorten the list but hopefully the idea is clear. My guess is that the vast majority of people would agree with this bucketing of those values. Where we are likely to differ is on how much weight we put on each value.

A libertarian might value liberty above all, a religious person might value meaning above all else,5 etc. But I see great danger in making any one value exclusive without regard for anything else, because absolutism is the enemy of nuance. The character Javert from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, who valued adherence to law exclusively, is a great cautionary example (spoiler alert: it didn’t end well for him).

Step 2: Do the “math”

This is the messy part. This is where you think about potential and predictable consequences of your decision and how they line up with your values. This is also where you understand that tradeoffs across your various values are an inherent part of most moral decisions. This is where you think about things like the fact that there are ways that increase overall happiness that also decrease fairness and other ways that preserve or even increase fairness. That there is sometimes a tradeoff between honesty and kindness.

As in utilitarianism, consequences are considered but across a broader set of values. The classical utilitarian is basically doing the math for happiness but ignoring any other value. My statistical mind thinks of it this way: utilitarians use a univariate model of consequences and I am pushing for a multivariate model6

The simplest situations are those where only one value is at play, like knowing you can improve someone’s day with a kind word at no expense to yourself. Situations like physician-assisted suicide, on the other hand, involve tradeoffs that are harder to achieve consensus on. Depending upon how you and I disagree on the importance of reverence for life versus happiness or liberty, we will reach different decisions. But at least we can have a discussion about what values we cherish and by roughly how much, and hopefully understand our differences more respectfully.

For people who crave certainty and universal agreement on moral decisions, my approach is probably very unsatisfying, but my view is that such cravings can’t honestly be satisfied.

The opportunity to make this pivot has been made possible by the willingness of my sentence-making efforts to take a little break so the finite cognitive energy I tend to muster could be leveraged elsewhere. Another factor, though, has been a limited ability to know when to call something a finished product.

This is a new challenge for me; during my corporate career, there was always a next iteration of the product we were building, so it was never done. It was only done for now. And, as long as we could say that it was enough improved to justify the resources we spent on it, and it continued to outperform our competitors, it was a success.

It’s different with creative work. While there is also iterative versioning in the creative process, most of it is non-public. The creator must be the curator of versioning, knowing when to select the one that is ready for eternity.

Sometimes, just as in product dev, there is a time-box or budgetary constraint, but without that kind of guardrail, it can turn into a Zeno’s paradox, where each revision gets you a little closer but you never reach the finish line.

I struggle with this moment of commitment in music, even where my intuition is strong. As an essayist, I have less intuition, and so more concern about knowing when to call the question and release something into the wild.

What all the wise folks I discuss this with seem to agree on is that you can’t really answer the question about when something is done without clearly understanding your intention. And what I always hear, naggingly, in my self-talk, is that my intention is nothing more than vanity, whether intellectual or creative. I can always point to an objective that doesn’t center on vanity, but I always question whether it is really an objective or just a rationalization2.

I wonder if part of my challenge with regard to intention stems from my skepticism about free will3. Being uncertain as to whether I can even intend seems like it could undermine my confidence in the sanctity of a creative intention.

Perhaps this is why my best work tends to be improvisational as opposed to developed. The beauty of improvisation is that you don’t have to worry about when it’s good enough because you only get one iteration. You may need to decide when the improvisation has run its course but that’s as much an act of discovery as of intention, in my experience. In fact, some of my most compelling moments of improvisation are those in which the intention is revealed in the process itself.

Perhaps I should stick with improvisation.

A few weeks back, I posted some rambling thoughts on recording. Here is an example of why I’m glad the microphone is always ready.

As a musician who considers himself somewhere between overachieving amateur and underachieving professional, I haven’t yet achieved the ability to disregard the fact that the record button is glowing. That’s one reason I can’t imagine making a living as a session musician. Session musicians are the surgeons of music: they perform under pressure with great confidence, every session requiring something unique of them.

In terms of writing, I’m an unconditional amateur, no question. In my corporate life, I loved digging in and honing written communications, my own and those of my colleagues (when asked). I didn’t have an intuitive knack for it, but I invested time in drafting and revising, probably more time than my employer might have wanted me to, given the other stuff on my plate I may have been short-changing. There were many in my peer group who achieved more than I did despite issuing atrociously written emails, so maybe I misallocated my efforts with respect to creating shareholder value. It sure was fun, though.

For years, I also sent a weekly email to our business group that generally had nothing to do with work. It was the typical “weekly diversion”, ranging from amusements to challenging perspectives, personal reflections, etc. It was well-received but it also taught me that, in the same way that I could never be a session musician, I could never be a columnist with contractual obligations to time-box writing regardless of real-time inspiration. I found that writing to fulfill an expectation is a lot like playing the piano with the recording light on. Everything seems easier when it’s impermanent and unaccountable.

It’s well accepted that when we know we are being observed, it alters our behavior1. As an atheist-leaning agnostic, I have to wonder what it feels like to deeply believe in a deity that pays attention to you all the time. Living with the recording light on without any means of editing puts us into a sort of metaphysical panopticon. I suppose that, if you believe that religion is meant to function as social control, it makes sense that the powers that be would want people to act as if they were being surveilled, just as some parents leverage the “Santa gaze” to help control their children.

Second Reflection: The Journal as Data

I’ve spent most of the last 20 years quasi-obsessing over the concept of analytical self-awareness. I’ve spent many hours compiling highly detailed data on all things biologically Dan, with a couple of more subjective metrics thrown in to give myself something that corresponds to what it feels like to be me.

I’m now realizing that the benefit of such granular data is limited by its quality; there are major calibration and continuity issues,2 and the accuracy of certain devices (e.g. CGM’s) is clearly suspect. The time I’ve invested in trying to make the data useful in the sense of understanding interactions, correlations and causations is costly relative to the value I’ve gotten from it. There is value in the data, but not much more than a less obsessive approach to tracking would have yielded.

I’m finding myself stepping back a bit and looking at things more conceptually, but still with some attempt to be rational and empirical and all that stuff I get preachy about. The data for my new approach is narrative. I’ve realized that the impact of journalling more regularly creates snapshots of my mental experience that stimulate reflection, at the very least. Writing words that I will never share with anyone other than down-the-road-me, with accountability to nothing but what is pouring directly out of my experience, creates an awareness and connection to whatever illusory continuity we associate with living within ourselves. Journalling is the writing equivalent of “dancing as if no one’s watching”.

The methodology for processing this information is stillness and reflection, as opposed to calculation. Numbers are great and still thrill me in a way that most people find strange, but I’m coming to realize that insight is amped up by multiple sources of information and multiple approaches to parsing it, not all of which fit into spreadsheets.

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Third Reflection: Microphones in the Living Room

I find the moments of agency in the creative process to be troublesome. I am more comfortable as a conduit, which is why I have always been drawn towards improvisation in music. At the piano, when a flow state ensues, I am in awe of the beauty that I participate in. While awareness of the recording light interferes with flow, I’ve found that getting into the habit of recording a lot, regardless of intention, is helpful. I am extremely fortunate that my wife tolerates the presence of a large mike permanently hovering over the piano in the living room.

It reduces the friction that setting up equipment can introduce into the creative act, which makes it easier to ignore the fact that I am being recorded. When everything is always ready to go, all I have to do is hit the button, whether I’m running scales or trying to tap into my inner Keith Jarrett. The more I record, the more likely it is that I will have recorded something worth preserving and sharing3.

Journalling is also a form of improvising and regardless of inspiration, the muscles get exercised. The writing act is like thinking with the record light on, and the more thoughts I record, the more likely it is that something of value will be preserved.

Even without inspiration, that which is written informs and leads to deeper reflection and self-insight. Just as my piano recordings map out my musical journey and my spreadsheets illuminate the path my biology has traveled, my journal provides breadcrumbs that allow me to retrace the mental states I have experienced. Three very different data sets, each with their own truth which, when stacked together, begin to approximate who and what I am.

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Back when I was in college in Madison WI, one of my philosophy courses was an overview of morality, which introduced me to the difference between Kant’s and Bentham’s models of evaluating the moral value of an act. I was struck by the fact that:

• frequently, both schools of thought would agree on the value of an act despite very different paths to that determination;

• there were situations where Bentham’s answer felt counterintuitive to me, and others where Kant’s did.

In class, partisans for each theory would point to examples of counterintuitive conclusions of the other one as a means for invalidating it. I remember suggesting that perhaps a better approach involves consideration of each theory’s points of agreement and disagreement. My professor responded that I was missing the point: to him, the two schools of thought were incompatible because they emerged from different first principles; when they led to the same conclusion, it was coincidental and not meaningful.

I may have misunderstood, but it seems to me that he was operating with a view that a single easily-articulated model of morality could successfully account for and evaluate the entire scope of human behavior, as long as it was derived in a valid and logical manner from the correct first principles. In situations where the conclusion seemed counterintuitive, the limits of our intuition were to blame, not the imperfection of the theory.

Wrong, but Useful

About a ten minute walk from the Humanities building was the Van Vleck building, which housed the math department, including the office of one George E. P. Box. I didn’t know who he was at the time, because he was a professor of applied math and statistics and I was still a pure math snob who regarded real-world applications as a vulgarity. My loss, because the quote for which he is frequently remembered would have come in very handy at that moment:

“Essentially all models are wrong but some are useful.”

Box was speaking of quantitative predictive models, but there is a broader wisdom that perhaps my philosophy professor was missing: that a model that is “wrong” can still be useful.

My -ism

There is a concept in predictive modeling known as “ensemble learning” which is based upon the principle that the combination of multiple models that are individually useful will yield an even more useful model. I didn’t have the language to respond to my professor at the time but what I was suggesting was a generalization of ensemble learning to other types of models (in this case, moral).

I’ve come to see this as a useful mental framework for thinking about the world in a lot of different arenas: psychology, economics, group dynamics, cooking... I’ve never felt comfortable identifying strongly with any particular school of thought, be it Buddhism, libertarianism, socialism, existentialism, or any other -ism, but I have made great use of many of them in moving through the world and trying to make sense of it. As such, perhaps I should identify myself as an adherent to “Ensemble Learning-ism”. That sounds clunky, though, so henceforth, I will refer to myself as an Ensemble Learner.

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I was born with a deep feeling for music that drew me to the piano at a really young age. I don’t have perfect pitch, but my relative pitch is accurate enough to arouse jealousy among some of my friends who are working musicians. I studied classically for a long time but was more drawn to jazz and various forms of popular music and I’ve always had a passion for improvisation.

On the other hand, I was not born with a particularly strong work ethic. I have a sense of responsibility and the ethical motivation of fulfilling obligations that require work but I’m way more of a hedonist than a challenge seeker. I’ve voluntarily taken on challenges but not with gusto: more out of a sense that it’s important for my health, kind of like lifting weights (which I hate because they are heavy). At heart, I lean more grasshopper than ant, but I’ve adapted well to the needs of modern life.

As a young man, I had far more self-awareness about my musical abilities than I did about my inner grasshopper. Unfortunately, my inner grasshopper was also a subtle manipulator, because it dangled ability as an excuse for not leaning into the work and I arrogantly took the bait.

It’s not that I didn’t spend hours at the piano week after week. I played my heart out, losing myself in flow-state improvisation, or in repeatedly playing songs that I had written but never refined or submitted to peer-review. In terms of diligent, deliberate practice, however, I spent very little time. As a result, I can often move people with the expressiveness of my playing, and I also flub a LOT of notes.

I also underestimated the value of professional discipline, in the sense of humble engagement with experienced musicians who could mentor not just in performance skills but in how to approach practice, how to listen to other musicians, how to make a good song great, etc. Instead of seeking feedback, I wanted validation. Again, arrogance.

We all have blind spots. I’ve learned that many of mine stem from arrogance. I suspect that for many, blind spots are hidden in the shadows cast by our strengths.

Two disclaimers:

1. I don’t have regret about my choices because I’ve gotten a lot of fulfillment from both my corporate career and my nonprofessional relationship with music.

2. I’m not making a statement about youth versus experience: my lack of wisdom was not emblematic of my age; it was emblematic of my arrogance. Plenty of other folks my age understood much more than I did.