(2018-06-03) Forte Metaskills Macrolaws And The Power Of Constraints

Tiago Forte: Meta-Skills, Macro-Laws, and the Power of Constraints

The role, I believe, that “tips and habits” play in productivity: rules that are designed to be broken in a journey of self-discovery. They resist a little bit, asking “Are you sure you want to choose your own adventure?” Which is helpful, because many times you shouldn’t. (Self-Improvement)

If “meta-learning” is learning how to learn, then meta-skills in this context involve “learning how to work.” Meta-skills are the skills you need to leverage other skills.

If meta-skills are the tools of survival, helping you stay alive long enough to find shelter, food, and water, then macro-laws are the map you’ll need to find your way to more interesting places. But this isn’t a map of some external terrain. It is a map of one’s own self-knowledge

The most extensive and explicit example of personal macro-laws I know of is Buster Benson’s wonderful Codex Vitae.

dealing in such constraints is playing with fire. Because there is very little, and perhaps no difference, between a genuine nugget of self-knowledge and what’s known as a “limiting belief.” A constraint that one minute helps you focus, in the next minute blinds you to an opportunity. A constraint that in one situation saves you from risk, in another situation limits your possibilities. This is why the skill of constantly formulating, discarding, testing, and refining macro-laws may be the most “meta” productivity skill of all.

I’m borrowing the term “macro-law” from John Holland’s paper on emergence, in which he provides a fascinating historical example illustrating how difficult it is to formulate them

Holland points out that the goal of defining such axioms is not simply to state what is true. There is a vast range of true, but uninteresting or unhelpful statements. Likewise, self-discovery is more than simply accumulating accurate descriptive facts about oneself. The goal is to define the direction of further study by “picking out a range of situations that occur frequently or involve possibilities that lever the system onto new paths.” Put another way, we are trying to “‘tune’ the constraints supplied by the new laws so that the study concentrates on interesting domains not easily apprehended or explored in the original setting.”

So how does one develop such macro-laws, if it takes deep self-knowledge to formulate them in the first place?

Through conducting practical experiments. But it isn’t the outputs of these experiments that matter, because this process is not deductive. It is the inputs that matter most. Specifically, it is deep immersion in the messy details of experiments, contending in hand-to-hand combat with the subtleties and ambiguities and exceptions unique to each one, that produces the best breakthroughs

What qualifies as “better experimentation” when it comes to human behavior is whatever enhances this tip-of-the-fingers intuition, not whatever happens to lend itself to easier measurement

There is a common thread uniting both meta-skills and macro-laws: the power of constraints. Meta-skills are constraints on how you work, to better leverage your knowledge, intelligence, time, people, and other resources. Macro-laws are constraints on what you work on, limiting your search space to a direction most likely to be fruitful.

Terrence Deacon proposes an answer in his (grueling, but original) book Incomplete Nature.

He argues that emergent phenomena are not more than the sum of their parts; they are less than the sum of their parts. In other words, emergence is defined by what is not there — by constraints

What if evolution is not a self-organizing process, but a self-simplifying process?

But if life is nothing but a dissipative structure, how can we explain that organisms do everything they can to reduce entropy? To keep their energy from flowing away?

Deacon argues that it is this very paradox that keeps it all going: work creates constraints (a beaver building a dam to channel water), but constraints also create work (a dam using channeled water to produce electricity).

We learn meta-skills to perform higher-leverage work, but the best source of leverage is creating new constraints — new macro-laws.