Cantus in memoriam

We all know the taste of our own tears
And your tears taste very much like mine
She held my hand so tightly that my fingers slept
Or maybe it was him, sitting on the other side
Who squeezed so hard
up, down, left, right, me, you, him, her, them
Somebody was singing Ave Maria
And in the echoes all those distinctions blurred with rainbow light

I stood at the podium and butchered a poem
While looking only at the coffin
My sobs rendered most words incoherent
But funerals are for grieving, not performances
To grieve forcefully, incoherently, is a potent invitation
Join me with your tears.

Two years earlier, when the spectre of death already loomed large
One composer’s contemplation of silence punctured me
With its persistent bell and an endless descent
One composer mourning a meeting that never happened
And in that moment I wondered if we ever truly meet
When all we ever hear are echoes.

Musings & Adventures

Frustration with the Sermon on the Mount

This article about De Blasio visiting the Vatican made me want to read the Sermon on the Mount, hoping I might be able to use those verses as a baseline for finding commonality with Christians. That went great until:

“anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”

This is terrible, harmful, destructive, wrong-headed advice. No wonder Christians have caused so much damage to themselves and others in the 1500 years since their rise to power in Europe. Even the most gracious excerpt from their Good Book teach you to hate your mind and to harm yourself both physically and psychically when natural processes happen.

And then along came some of the language that strips women of agency in their relationships:

“anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.”

At which point I gave up, for the thousandth time, on finding ways to appreciate more than a few discrete verses from the Bible.

Creative Culture, Enlightened Business, Musings & Adventures, Tech

Using RailsBridge to get women coders into the room

“The Ruby community tends to be really welcoming in and of itself, and then Railsbridge takes that and puts an anti-sexist and pro-diversity spin on it.”

– Lillie Chilen in a blog post titled Railsbridge Changed My Life

The official account of the RailsBridge origin story tells of founders Sarah Mei and Sarah Allen deciding to host a workshop in 2009 for women who want to learn to use Ruby on Rails. Their goal was to “move the needle” of gender balance in the San Francisco Rails community from the embarrassingly skewed ratio of 97% men and 3% women to a more equitable ratio. The event sold out within 24 hours. The website comments “It turned out every speculation of “Well, maybe there aren’t more women in programming because they just aren’t interested” was 100% rubbish (as we all knew), and there has been an insatiable appetite for education and community ever since that first workshop.” A year later, in 2010, Sarah Mei gave a talk about successfully “moving the needle” from 3% women to 18% women and mused about how to get that ratio to a 50/50 balance.

I’ve been involved with the Ruby Users of Minnesota (aka “RUM”) since 2006 and I’ve been teaching people how to use Rails since 2010. For most of that time, sadly, the RUM meetings and gatherings of coders tended to match the 2009 numbers cited by the RailsBridge website – 3% women, 97% men. That needle started to move when the first RailsBridge workshop happened here in 2012 as part of the 2012 JRubyConf. Like many RailsBridge events, the workshop sold out almost immediately, as did the second Minneapolis RailsBridge workshop 6 months later. The tone of response from established local male hackers was one of enthusiasm that this was finally happening in our city and encouragement for it to continue. This support was accompanied by a glimmer of pride about the fact that at the code camp for kids, which also happened as part of JRubyConf, 45% of the attendees were girls. I heard multiple accounts claiming that a visible contingent of the parents in the room were hacker guys who want their daughters to know how to sling code.

I’m lucky to be connected with a community where people simply won’t tolerate the idea that your gender somehow affects your capacity to excel as an engineer. My male peers around here always seemed to assume that the tech industry’s gender imbalance is simply an oddity of cultural patterns, an anomaly that could easily change over time. However, they also seemed resigned to the idea that a software engineer’s lot in life is to spend your days working in a monoculture of smart dudes. In other words, most of the software engineers I know have not maintained a conscious bias favoring male engineers, but they also have not seen their field’s gender imbalance as a problem that needs to be fixed, nor have they seen it necessary to change the culture of their workplaces or to increase inclusiveness in the environments where skill-sharing occurs. Thankfully there are some wonderful and influential exceptions to this rule, but as a whole, that’s the behavior I’ve witnessed.

There’s nothing gender-specific about the RailsBridge curriculum; they’re just well-designed workshops.

In my own work environment, which mainly involves collaborating with software development groups at libraries, the gender balance of teams tends to be around 20%-30% women. If you count only the coders, the number is closer to 18%. At the HydraCamp training events I’ve run, which reflect this gender ratio, we started using the RailsBridge curriculum in 2013 because it’s a really well structured introduction to Ruby on Rails. Pedagogically, the RailsBridge curriculum is a great set of teaching materials and, importantly, people keep them up to date as the Rails framework evolves. This makes those curriculum materials extremely useful. We even overhauled the core Hydra tutorials to reflect the RailsBridge style.

There’s nothing gender-specific about the RailsBridge curriculum; they’re just well-designed workshops. So what is it about RailsBridge that helps push the needle of diversity in the Rails community?

I think it’s about safe space. Simply by declaring a training event as being explicitly aimed at increasing diversity, it provides a promise that you won’t be treated like a three headed monster when you show up and that you will be neither judged, attacked, alienated nor neglected by the instructors and the other students. It assures participants that they can arrive with only a laptop and the desire to learn, and they can expect to leave with new skills, a sense of empowerment and a sense of inclusion.

When we started kicking around the idea of doing a RailsBridge-based workshop* as part of the LTG Summit, I admitted to my collaborators that I’ve taught the curriculum numerous times within HydraCamp events, but never taught it as an explicit RailsBridge event. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out what, if anything, I will do differently in leading the workshop at ER&L. At the moment, I’m pretty sure I won’t change anything other than providing a bit of background and history about RailsBridge at the beginning of the day. Can you think of anything else that should be done differently from a regular training workshop?

[This is a cross-post that I wrote for LTGSummit.org and published there.]

* Note: The workshop at ER&L is not technically a RailsBridge workshop because we are charging $25 to attendees. We are, however, using the RailsBridge curriculum and aspiring to create the same learning environment that a RailsBridge workshop would offer.

Enlightened Business, Musings & Adventures, Uncategorized

Thomas W Malone on Collective Intelligence, with interesting findings about Gender and Intelligence

Head to edge.org to watch this video of Thomas W Malone speaking about Collective Intelligence. Among his many interesting findings, he discloses a significant gem about gender and intelligence of groups. Malone teaches at MIT Sloan School of Management.

at 9:05:

“we found that the collective intelligence of the group was significantly correlated with the percentage of women in the group… it looks like it’s a more or less linear trend where more women are better all the way up to all women. Now, Also important to realize that the gender effect is largely statistically mediated by the social perceptiveness effect.”

Musings & Adventures, Random

Getting my Diacritics Corrected at MIT

While visiting the Stata center at MIT, I scrawled my usual chalkboard graffiti in the lobby – OM MANI PADME HUM. An hour later, I found that someone had actually “corrected” the diacritized sanskrit “NI”, which looks backwards when compared with the standard Tibetan alphabet.

Barely 2 hours on this campus and I’ve already been anonymously second-guessed by a cheeky smartypants.

After a brief moment of sheer amusement, I decided to engage constructively.

This is why I love visiting academia.

Meditatation, Musings & Adventures, Random, Travel

Photos: Pullahari Mahakala Torma Burning during Losar 2013

At some point I might write something explaining what’s going on in these photos, but for now I’ll just share the photos themselves. The full set of nearly 300 photos is in an album on on Google Plus.

Images, Meditatation, Musings & Adventures, Random

Photos: Drupon Khenpo teaching Rigpe Dorje Institute Spring Session

These photos are from the 2013 spring session (the 10-day meditation programme) of Rigpe Dorje Institute. I’ve posted a gallery of all the photos from this session on Google Plus. Here are some highlights:

Rigpe Dorje Institute Meditation Class in the Mahamudra Shrine Hall at Pullahari Monastery

Drupon Khenpo Teaching, Margaret Translating. Vajradhara statue in background.

Drupon Khenpo Teaching

Meditatation, Musings & Adventures, Random

What Western Science and Buddhist Philosophy have to offer each other

While sitting in Drupon Kehnpo’s lectures on the views of the various Buddhist schools, I frequently find myself understanding his explanations by means of modern scientific understanding. In my experience over the years, the cautious critical combination of these systems of explanations consistently gives rise to deep clarity of understanding that advances my ability to work with, explore, and discuss either system. I’m prone to become exuberant when I see how this blending of insights has helped me, and when I see how it could also be fruitful for others.

In these cases, when I look carefully, I see that what excites me is the possibility that the incredible system of post-enlightenment western science, which has made unbelievable progress in a mere few hundred years, actually has the capacity to express insights about mind, cognition, reality, and experience that align with those of Buddhism but are formulated using language that arises entirely from the axioms of the western scientific viewpoint.

From the time of the enlightenment until now (though with roots going much further back), there has been a fairly strict division between so-called “hard” science and metaphysics in the west. This division, partially arising as retaliation against the hegemony of the Christian church, has been extremely fruitful. To study the philosophy of science is to study the pracitcalities of a concerted communal effort to circumvent self-deception in the strident pursuit of truth. Now we’ve reached a point in history where some fields, particularly cognitive science, neuroscience, and physics, find themselves being forced to grapple with topics that were previously categorized as metaphysics but they’re addressing them with grounding and language that come from scientific method combined with observations accumulated over centuries of scientific exploration.

When you look at the history of ideas in Buddhist philosophy, particularly the mahayana schools’ progressively refined analyses of phenomena and the mind that observes them, and compare their observations and explanations with those of modern cognitive science or post-Einstein physics, you find clear parallels along extremely important lines. In those cases I’ve found my western-educated mind naturally prefers the explanations coming from western traditions. In fact, the novel observations from western traditions sometimes sidestep sticky points that have harangued Buddhist philosophers for centuries, or provide explanations whose grace, simplicitly and completeness makes it much easier to find an intuitive understanding of the patterns being explored. This does not, however, mean that western science has outdone and overtaken the Buddhist traditions; it means that western science is able to offer its own graceful explanations of many aspects of phenomenal reality. In other words, Western science is excellent at explaining phenomena on both a coarse and extremely subtle level — even better than the most refined Mahayana schools — but when it comes to the most important questions about the mind that experiences those phenomena, western explanations falter and quickly descend into a confused space on the boundary between science and metaphysics. That thrilling space is where all the interesting action occurs and where the most strident explorers are continually honing, revisiting, and reimagining their assumptions about how to make observations that are not deceptive.

Some people think that this means western scientists need to loosen their standards and welcome outside views with a warm embrace. I think the opposite. Western scientists need to make their standards more strict than ever, then with an open mind and a precise understanding of what we do and don’t know they need to apply those standards equally to all assumptions including their own. Meanwhile, what’s really needed is for people within older traditions, ones that never shied away from metaphysics, to also apply their most thorough scrutiny to explanations coming out of the west and see how much mileage they can get. I’m certain that in both cases, we will find that each tradition has profound improvements to offer to the other especially in the domains of pedagogy, vocabulary, and praxis.

Enlightened Business, Musings & Adventures

What’s the difference between a For-profit and a Non-Profit?

From the perspective of a founder, or from the perspective of a funder/investor, what is the difference between a For-profit and a Non-profit?

What opportunities or advantages does each structure provide for creating value or benefit?

What is its effect on an organization’s ability to survive

major social & political upheaval
long-term recession
long-term affluence

How does it affect an organization’s definition of value and its relationship with value?

Meditatation, Musings & Adventures, Random

Loving Kindness, Compassion, Mass Destruction and the Singularity

These are some of my thoughts on what tantric meditation traditions have to tell us about how to pro-actively deal with situations where technology triggers culture-wide crises of identity and ethics. It’s all about training the mind.

In 2001 Dr. Vladimir Chaloupka at University of Washington invited me to participate in a graduate seminar on “Knowledge Enabled Mass Destruction” whose purpose was to foster interdisciplinary discourse about the feasibility of, and possible responses to, the kind of global threats posed by Eric Drexler’s Grey Goo Problem and Bill Joy’s related essay Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us. In short, if you measure the progress of civilization in terms of the amount of damage that could be wrought by five determined people acting on their own, what does it mean when you reach a point where those five people could wipe out civilization completely, or make the planet uninhabitable? Is that even possible? Have we already reached that point? What can/should we do in response? As discourse and speculation about the so-called singularity continues to build, this topic seems more relevant than ever.

I think Dr Chaloupka’s reason for hosting the seminar sheds useful light on the subject. He said that the nuclear bomb led Physicists to talk about ethics for the first time in a field that is designed to be entirely focused on observable facts, explicitly excluding any deference to normativity. He painted a picture of this high-minded pursuit of pure science being stopped in its tracks by that single moment where the hubris of scientific progress led to holocaust on a previously unimaginable scale. He said the discipline of Physics was forever changed by the burden of knowing that their work had produced nuclear bombs, and thus indirectly made nuclear proliferation possible. This has led Physicists to tackle issues of global ethics in ways that most other traditions haven’t. As other fields have now taken on a pace & tone of innovation that almost promises the invention of new horrific dangers, he wondered if the contrite inventors of the atom bomb might offer some guidance or preemptive inspiration towards caution.

Dr Chaloupka asked each participant in the seminar to present some contribution from zir own field of expertise. For example, a virologist addressed questions about weaponized superbugs and an engineer described the nuances of nanotech. I, an undergrad pursuing a Bachelors in Comparative Religion, spoke about Tantric Sex. My presentation focused on the fact that tantric traditions include meditation practices that are dangerous if you engage in them if you’re not adequately prepared.

Though the idea of a meditation practice being dangerous may seem strange, there’s ample evidence floating around these days. Some people definitely get really messed up when they do this stuff. Even with carefully maintained traditions, things get seriously colorful at moments. For this reason, before teaching these meditation techniques, authentic lineages are extremely careful to ensure that practitioners have first completed the appropriate foundational practices to stabilize their minds.

There is a wild and colorful variety of tantric traditions. Most of their practices do not involve sex at all. I chose to focus on tantric sex for this presentation because it’s something appealing and potent that has come to be taught outside the original traditions. I drew the parallel that tinkering with potent technologies in pursuit of exciting innovations is like going to some snazzy weekend course on tantric sex and then tinkering with the techniques in pursuit of better orgasms.

In the end, I was happy with my choice of subject matter, but I wasn’t satisfied with my presentation. When I finished my slides, the other participants asked questions to the effect of “Ok. So these traditions say you should be careful to prepare before you let the cat out of the bag, but what does that tell us about how to deal with a situation where the cat (technologies allowing determined people to do global harm) was never in a bag?” I couldn’t give a satisfactory answer, despite being convinced that there was something to be gleaned from this parallel. I simply didn’t know enough about the subject.

For years afterward, I’ve periodically sought to formulate a more complete presentation of the idea I was trying to get across. Now finally, I think I might have put my finger on it. I’m not going to speak about tantric sex, though it’s such a compelling idea. Instead, I’m going to look at the traditional purpose of initiation and secrecy in tantric traditions and how that applies to the contemporary crisis of ethics that Dr. Chaloupka challenged us to address. This analysis definitely applies to the idea that humanity is approaching a technological singularity, but it also applies to run-of-the-mill crises of ethics triggered by technological advancement.

Tantric meditation traditions carry thousands of years worth of repeatable observations, drawn from trial and error, about the potential and limitations of the human mind. They also carry myriad praxes/technologies for fulfilling that potential. What does that tell us about super viruses and murderous nanobots? Actually, it tells us a lot. Remember that technology is created and used by humans. To understand technology, you must look at the human mind. In that sense, these tantric traditions are particularly useful because they’re all about skillfully working with the mind when it’s at its most potent, when it’s overwhelmed by its own energy.

Why do tantric meditation traditions have structures of secrecy and initiation? Within these traditions, the few practices that are kept secret are ones that are particularly potent. They’re designed to dismantle the ego and obliterate our ordinary, confused ways of seeing things so that the practitioner can perform the profoundly simple act of nakedly seeing mind as it is. In a way, these practices are invoking a deep crisis of identity that cuts straight down to your fundamental concepts about reality. If you encounter practices like this outside the context of the tradition in which they were developed, there are four main dangers:

1) You could pose a danger to yourself.
2) You could pose a danger to others.
3) You just might miss the point, or get the wrong point. In other words, for pragmatic pedagogical reasons, things are presented in a particular order.
4) You could pose a danger to the tradition.

What does that mean, and what does it mean to be adequately prepared? Of course the details will be unique to every tradition, practice, and teacher, but there are some basic patterns that apply consistently.

1) Without mental stability you could pose a danger to yourself.
2) Without loving kindness and compassion, you could pose a danger to others.
3) Without precise understanding of what you are/aren’t doing, what’s being communicated, and why you’re doing it, you might not get any benefit from the practice or might harm the tradition by developing an incorrect understanding of the practices being transmitted.

So the reasons for this secrecy are actually very practical, and the fundamental requirements for doing these tantric practices are the same key things that all Buddhist traditions emphasize: mental stability (shamatha), loving kindness & compassion (bodhicitta), and precise understanding (prajna) combied with insight (vipassana).

We can apply this directly to the crisis of ethics posed by technological advancement, which actually comes down to a crisis of psyche and a crisis of society triggered by the fact that technology is outpacing our psychic and social capacities. Specifically, this manifests as

1) Crisis of mental stability
2) Crisis of ethics & normative decisions
3) Crisis of realizing that we lack understanding, lack connection with reality, and lack insight into what we’re doing or why we’re doing it

As you can see, it’s the same issues. We’re encountering a crisis of identity — one that could challenge our fundamental concepts about reality — and what we lack are mental stability, loving kindness, compassion, precise understanding and insight. It’s the same situation, with the same solution.

Say you did take that snazzy weekend course and instead of groovy orgasms you got a tantra-style psychological crisis and totally freaked out. Now your mind’s been blown and it keeps re-blowing and you can’t cope at all. What do you do? If you’re lucky, it occurs to you to go find an authentic master and ask zir for help. While the advice you get from that master could end up being almost anything, we can be certain that the remedy is going to eventually focus on those same ingredients that I keep repeating — mental stability, loving kindness, compassion, precise understanding and insight.

Solution: Training the Mind

Here’s the good news. Absolutely every moment is a crisis of the sort we’re talking about, and always has been, because our confused way of seeing the world doesn’t line up with reality. Our ordinary way of thinking assumes that reality is made up of finite truly existent things experienced by a finite truly existent self, but we know that’s not true. That friction manifests as constant dissatisfaction, which Buddha called dukkha (suffering). The Buddha spent a lot of time cutting to the heart of the matter of suffering and he found that it has a cause — confusion/ignorance — which can be cut. What methodology did he use to cut that cause of suffering? Mental stability, loving kindness, compassion, precise understanding and insight. [This paragraph is paraphrasing the Four Noble Truths, which is the first thing the Buddha taught and comprises the most essential Buddhist tenets.]

The mind is plastic. You can cultivate these things. These are the authentic, tested means. Test them. Until you do cultivate them, the crisis will continue and you will continue to harm yourself and others over and over and over and over. Grey goo is just the latest turn.

flyingzumwalt

Category Archives: Musings & Adventures