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"No pain, no gain" makes for a great meme – pithy and catchy and rhyming and rhythmic – too bad it's also very inaccurate.

Gain comes from discomfort, not pain. There's a subtle but important difference between the two.

Pain – physical or mental – is a warning sign. We've exceeded our capacity, we're risking injury. When we feel pain, we need to stop what we're doing immediately, and figure out what's wrong.

Discomfort comes with all new experience. If the experience isn't new, like watching your favorite movie, it's comfortable. Comfortable can be enjoyable and restful, but all growth depends on new experience, like watching another movie by the same director. Growth – gain – depends on discomfort.

Discomfort and enjoyment can partially overlap – some people enjoy hard exercise, challenging music, strong flavors. But the same people might not enjoy deep stretches, the pressure of performing, meeting new people, etc.

The newer the experience, the greater the discomfort. It can be so intense it feels like pain. What's the difference?

Pain comes on fast, discomfort has a slow burn. Pain lingers, discomfort fades when the new experience stops. Pain is sharp, discomfort is dull.

Discomfort has the potential to get you something you don't have. Pain warns you you're about to lose something.

I don't have a good catchphrase to replace it though. Pain ain't gain? Discomfort for profit? I'll have to keep working on that one.

The importance of the 4th of July is not the signing of the Declaration of Independence – historians agree that almost certainly happened over several days in August – but committing to publishing. 250 years later, well into the electronic era, and at the dawn of artificial intelligence, publishing is poised to make a comeback in importance.

After high school, one of the random jobs I had was working in a print shop. One small but steady line of their business came from lawyers, as some court business expected traditional stationary. I got trained on what was considered a dead-end, low status position in the shop, running an old-school platen letterpress. I cast type from molten lead, assembled it in a rack, spread ink on a roller, and then hand-fed paper into the machine as its giant iron jaws opened and closed rhythmically.

Printing demanded commitment to verifying accuracy. If a mistake was made anywhere between receiving the customer's order and feeding the paper into the press, it could be a crippling loss to the business, from paper stock to lost work time to damaged reputation.

Electronic publishing, moving close to light speed without a physical component, degraded the importance of the commitment to accuracy. Refreshing the browser appeared to magically change reality. Previous mistakes seemed to vanish from existence after edits and deletes. Software developers knew better, as they struggled with permanent effects like cache invalidation, but their cries went unheeded.

Today, journalism has largely given up College professors describe students submitting work they can't explain.

On July 2nd 1776, the Continental Congress voted the colonies independent from Britain. This act officially began the revolution, so John Adams among others thought history would celebrate that date. But although local (Philadelphia) newspapers reported the vote, the report of the vote was not the same as official announcement and explanation.

Two days later, July 4th, Congress approved the final edits to the Declaration's text, and tasked the drafting committee with printing it. Franklin and Jefferson went to printer John Dunlap around 6pm. Dunlap worked through the night, producing 200 copies – dated July 4th – by the morning of July 5th.

Those copies then began to be distributed at various speeds. For example, the Pennsylvania Evening Post re-printed it the day after receiving, on July 6th. Washington had it read to the Army, gathered in New York City, on July 9th. Another copy went on a ship to England, arriving many weeks later.

As word spread, the date associated was July 4, the publishing. Most historians now agree the "engrossed" copy – the famous handwritten version, with the big "John Hancock" – didn't get signed until August 2, 1776.

The use of AI as a tool has me thinking about Newton’s law, ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’. I believe this profound truth applies not just in the domain of physics, but to all of life.

A variation on that truth: every tool we use makes us weaker in some opposite way.

Modern engines perform way more reliably than old ones, but when a problem does occur, diagnosing it requires a computer. Using mapping software atrophies spatial awareness. We communicate with loved ones halfway across the world, but we don’t know the people across the street.

Sometimes the weakness can be disguised as positive. Wearing shoes enables us to do things we couldn’t do without them, and also keeps our feet soft and free from callouses. But reliance creates dependence. In an emergency where a person urgently needs to walk barefoot, that dependence can be life-threatening.

The history of disruptive technologies shows a pattern: weaknesses can’t be perceived at first. During our lifetimes we’ve seen the impact of mobile and internet. Only recently have we started becoming aware of their opposite reactions: distraction, uncertainty, isolation.

So when people ask these days, how are you using AI? I answer, with careful limitations. I’ve played around, and I’m certainly paying attention to developments. But I’m not in a hurry to become dependent before the weaknesses are known.

There’s a gold rush vibe right now that threatens us under time pressure: don’t get left behind! But any time someone puts time pressure on you, you should immediately question why – who benefits? Remember during the gold rush, the people who got really rich didn’t go into the hills, they sold shovels and blankets in town.

To go fast, go slow. Rushing creates mistakes which take more time to fix than avoiding them.

Equal and opposite reactions.

According to hard science, the hippies weren't wrong: everything is made of vibrations.

We all remember Pythagoras for his right triangle theorem. But he made another discovery, arguably just as important. The story goes, he was passing a blacksmith shop. He realized the tone produced by striking different bars produced a pitch inverse to the bar's length – long bar, lower pitch, and vice versa.

Like all profound insights, this seems obvious in retrospect. But the power of the insight comes from assigning an objective measurement to a subjective quality. This power extends far beyond sound.

Pythagoras measured notes which sound similar (octaves) as having a 2:1 ratio. Think of the first two notes of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" – the lower and higher notes for 'some' and 'where' have this ratio. The scientist Hertz measured these vibrations per second, and they're labeled with his name. If 'some' is at 440 Hertz, 'where' will be at 880. Going down, you'll find 2:1 pairs again at 220, 110, and 55Hz.

The note name for 440Hz is 'A4', because it's right in the middle of the range that most voices can sing. 220/110/55 are A3, 2, and 1. Conventional names for the notes stop at A1, because the lowest voice type, Basso Profundo (literally 'deep bass') can't sing much below that. Human hearing ends around 20Hz, or put another way, a pattern repeating 20 times per second is the slowest vibration ears can hear.

We can still perceive vibrations below 20Hz, they're just not sounds anymore. Between 3-20Hz, we feel it in our chest. Remember the glass of water vibrating as the T. Rex approached in 'Jurassic Park'? That was a genius visual cue to link to the embodied sense of feeling a vibration below the range of hearing, around 5-10Hz.

Between 1/2-2Hz, we perceive patterns of vibration as rhythms. We experience those patterns not in our ears or chest, but in our short-term memory. A clock ticking once per second – 1hz, or 60 beats per minute – sets the pace we'd call mid-tempo music.

Longer than once per second, alternating rhythm becomes the pattern. Contrasting feel like verse/chorus or upbeat/downbeat several times per minute causes a sensation of theme and variations.

Longer patterns in the range around 1-10 minutes we perceive in long-term memory, with names like songs, tracks, or in classical music, movements. Those roll up into longer categories: album, playlist, sonata, symphony.

Longer. You wake up and get ready, you go out and do something, you have a little free time, then you rest. We experience this pattern as a day. Longer. An artist's entire body of work could take a whole day to listen to, but follows the same pattern: exploration, engagement, exposition, summary. Longer. Your parents and their parents and their parents and their parents. History.

Longer. The followers of Pythagoras called the motion of the planets musica universalis because the ratios of the planets' orbits closely matched the ratios of pleasing harmonies. The concept fell out of favor after Kepler as better measurements showed that 'close' was not exact, and in some cases not all that close.

But modern astronomy has found new examples. Bodies locked in 'orbital resonance' perform a gravitational dance extremely close to exact ratios. Asteroseismology studies sound waves within stars. And we know the solar system itself completes an orbit around the galaxy every 260 million years.

The longer the vibration, the deeper the note. The universe resonates as the ultimate Basso Profundo, the deepest voice.

We all perform our own cargo cult rituals.

Cargo cults are a phenomenon with origins in WWII. During the war, the Japanese and American militaries moved tremendous amounts of supplies around the South Pacific. They set up bases on remote islands, some of whom had never seen foreigners before.

These islanders had a culture of gift-giving. Social status depended on how much you were able to give away. The person who was capable of giving a gift that the recipient couldn't match got the upper hand.

So the appearance of strangers bearing unimaginable wealth, casually sharing it, and then disappearing at the war's end was a terrible shock to these communities. Unable to understand descriptions of how the goods were physically produced using industrial methods, the natives decided – using the best logic available to them – that it must involve magic.

The foreigners cleared landing strips, built control towers, and listened to the radio, and then the planes landed with goods. So the natives cleared space out of the jungle, built bamboo towers, wore coconut headphones, hoping the goods would flow.

Arrogance leads some people to feel superior to these natives' concepts of magic, but that's a mistake. In their own way, the natives are conducting a form of primitive science. And our advanced science is not as different from magic as we might hope.

As a programmer, I can tell you every bug you have to investigate stems from a discrepancy between how the system actually works, and your mental model of how you think it works. The harder a bug is to understand, the more subtle and deeply embedded your incorrect assumption. One critical element of solving a bug is swallowing your pride and accepting you did not fully understand the system before.

This exposes a fundamental disconnect between the human mind and true reality, which has been known as far back as Plato's Allegory of the Cave. It is not possible to tell the difference between a correct theory, and an incorrect theory which happens to produce the same predictions, until there is some difference between them.

Once, when my kid was little, we got in my old car to go somewhere, and it wouldn't start. I tried turning it over a couple times, and then just sat there for a minute to think. The kid said, "Maybe it would help if we sang a song!" I didn't think singing a song would help, but sometimes waiting a minute does. So we sang a song while we waited in case, say, the carburator was flooded.

When we finished the song, it still wouldn't start. Over time, you can exclude certain possibilities in practice because they never solve the problem. But the fact that waiting sometimes solves the problem can't be so easily tied to a solution. It could be carburator flooding, but an overheated ignition coil will also work after a waiting period.

In a car engine, if you know what you're doing, you can get inside the carburator to visually inspect it, or put a multi-meter on the coil to read how many volts it's producing. There's no way to "look inside" a computer though. You can set outputs at various places, and verify they have the values you expect, but it is always possible that the output is not coming from where you think it is. This is the essence of how computer malware hides itself – it swaps out the value you think you're accessing with the one it wants you to see, like Indiana Jones swapping the gold statue with the bag of sand.

Reality is like an operating system. We can experiment to verify certain characteristics of our mental model have the values that we expect. But there's no way to be sure our mental model is pointing at the right thing.

This explains why no one has a claim to arrogance. No matter how sure you are, there is forever and always a chance that you might be wrong. It's barely been fifty years since we learned smoking causes cancer, doctors in lab coats made ads extolling the virtues of some brand of cigarettes. Something about our current understanding of the world is undoubtably wrong.

And how awful would that be, if you were unkind to someone and you weren't even correct. So since there's always a chance, you can never risk arrogance.

If you're kinda not sure, be sure to be kind.

Like it or not, because science changes how we see the world, every scientist is also a philosopher of science. When Isaac Newton delivered his theory of gravity, he also released a secretly radical philosophy on the world – calculism.

"Hypothesis non fingo", he wrote, 'I feign no hypothesis.' Newton knew that calculus and gravity produced a tremendous description of reality, but he had no explanation for it. Why this invisible force could act on bodies, instantly, across great distances.

Three hundred years later, the physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a paper musing on "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Numbers." Unreasonably effective is a great way to describe the tsunami Newton unleashed. Any belief that science does not accurately describe – and therefore control – physical reality gets ripped apart by an unrelenting onslaught of technology so advanced it is indistinguishable from magic.

We're drowning in unreasonably effective descriptions of reality, but starving for meaningful explanations. The world's population has exploded as humans have become (on average) safer, healthier, and better fed than any creatures who ever lived before. But now we face diseases of despair, of sedentary affluence, disconnection from our natural state of mind and destruction of our natural environment.

The devil's bargain Newton made reaches its peak with a saying common in the physics community: "shut up and calculate." This anti-philosophy insists physicists ignore questions of meaning their work raises, and focus solely on its effectiveness.

I've noticed a strong correlation between the intensity of someone's dedication to calculism and their unhappiness. The "shut up" part of "shut up and calculate" is not delivered with a wink and a smirk, it's a threat. And the correlation extends outside of academia: secular calculists believe people's value can be compared by their degrees, earning power, houses and spouses, that the meaning of life lies in maximizing efficiency.

I'm not arguing we give up on science, move to a cabin in Montana. Unreasonable effectiveness is here to stay: it's too dang useful. But it's high time we start looking at the other half of the universe.

Calculism describes the shared world of physical reality, the world outside of our heads. But in a paradox, we can only experience that reality inside our heads. Subjective experience makes up half of everything. A fascinating, sublime, mysterious half, that fills the hollow shell of objectivity with meaning.

Scientific solutions fall short, calculism can't cut it alone.

We need scientific spirituality.

Buckle up, friends, tough post ahead. I believe that darkness is necessary, in order for light to exist. And the world seems awful dark right now. So this is going to have to get dark before it can get lighter.

Many of you know I help organize Portland Bike Party, a monthly social ride that attracts hundreds of riders. Our ride was scheduled for today, but in the wake of the Lewiston tragedy, the volunteer organizers' group has passionately debated how best to go forward. We're making an official announcement soon.

But there's some things this has compelled me to say, about the relationship between light and darkness, safety and danger.

Darkness runs in my family. Over the years, three of my grandparents killed themselves, and my parents suffered from untreated mental illness.

I have no shame about this anymore. Mental health is physical health. Some people have a family history of diabetes or heart attacks or cancer, this happens to be mine. I just have to practice strong mental health hygiene, and a huge part of that is the bicycle.

As a kid, my BMX was an escape pod to eject out of a painful house. I could ride to a friend's house and experience normalcy for a little while.

As a teenager, I vowed not to be like my parents. That's a cliche for a lot of kids, but for me, it was a matter of life and death. I had to figure out how to be different from them in order to survive. The BMX got stolen, I got my driver's license, but the pure joy and feeling of freedom remained.

As a young adult in Boston, I started biking to work, to combine my travel and exercise time. But the bicycle quickly showed itself to be the best antidepressant I could get. Part of the antidepressant effect is simply exercise. Mental health is physical, and exercise is an essential part.

Another essential part, frankly, is the danger.

Cycling among cars is like Pamplona's Running of the Bulls. There's potholes and parked car doors opening and people stepping off the curb without looking. And unfortunately, a small minority of drivers boast about making 'punishment passes', where they intentionally shave close to scare cyclists off the road.

While cycling, you have to give your complete and undivided attention to the present moment, the entire time. Meaning you can't devote any brainpower to your other 'problems'.

I worked for startups, an insanely stressful environment. But I would arrive at the office with a clear head, a body ready to sit, and a sense of gratitude that I had already accomplished the hardest thing I would do all day. Going home was the reverse, where I sweat out all the stress of the day without thinking about it.

Another essential part is the camaraderie. I've made lifelong friends through bikes. All cyclists have something deep in common: we take an explicit risk when we get on our bikes. It seems like the safe thing to do would be to ride in a car.

Safety is a tricky concept though. The Journal of American Medicine published a huge study a couple years ago that showed cycling reduces 'all cause' mortality by 5%. That doesn't sound like much, but it means that if you cycle regularly, you're 5% less likely to die for any reason. The slight increase in the risk of a crash is offset by the greatly decreased risk of diabetes, heart attack, stroke – and yes, my personal favorite, suicide.

In other words, counterintuitively, I'm actually safer biking to work than driving.

But there's even more to it. Staring at the danger of death – the darkness – helps me see the light of life.

I have a friend in Ukraine who told me, a couple months after the invasion, she had never seen so many acts of kindness and courage in her entire life.

A strange relationship exists between darkness and light. The firefighter needs a burning building to run into. Doctors and nurses need disease and injury to heal. Parents need the vulnerability of children to nurture and protect.

Staring at the sun or hiding under the covers both make a person blind. We can only see clearly when there is a balance.

In times of light, we need to look towards the darkness, and vice versa.

So – spoiler alert – it appears the official ride will be rescheduled, as it's supposed to be a party, and the party vibes are gone. But I know a lot of my fellow cyclists want to show up in a celebration of gratitude for life, and an act of defiance against those who deny it. I'll be there.

I love all of you. I love both the darkness and light. I love life.

Sincerely,

Bicycle Punk

Artificial spirituality: creating meaning

In Deuteronomy 11:26, God says to the Israelites: “Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.” Today’s blessing and curse happens to be AI.

There’s a huge amount of speculation about AI’s impact right now. After years of programming, one thing I can tell you is it’s very difficult to predict the impact software will have on people. When the internet first started, most people just thought it would be a different way of reading your local paper. Remember local papers?

AI will undoubtedly have a huge impact, like the internet did. And it will change us, as all technology does. But chances are it won’t be in the way it’s currently predicted.

So if we can’t predict how AI will change things, how can we prepare for it?

One, we can focus on the part guaranteed to happen: change. Change is hard and we don’t like it, but it is coming. Get ready to let go. AI will be used in cyber attacks, but it will also be used to defend against them. It will destroy some cultural institutions, like the internet did; but it will create its own, like the internet did. We’ll have to learn new skills.

Two, we can focus on the part which doesn’t change: human nature. The internet did not make people gossipy, materialistic, or idle consumers of empty entertainment. We easily notice how any technology concentrates negative aspects of human nature – it’s much harder to see positive ones, but they’re there.

Here’s the AI question I don’t hear anyone asking: what’s the point of being human?

First computers did arithmetic, and we dismissed it, because the machine didn’t “understand” the motions it was going through. Then computers beat us at chess, but we dismissed that too. A machine could never be creative! Now we have machines painting pictures based on the punchline of a joke they invented.

Regardless of whether you accept the machine is “thinking”, it’s pretty inescapable at this point that a machine will be able to do anything a person can, better, soon.

In order to survive, I doubt we’re going to have to battle superintelligent robots. I think we’re going to have to battle with our own shadows.

I think we’re going to have to create meaning.

Happy New Year, amigos!

We all know about New Year's Resolutions, and how hard they are to keep. I'd like to help – I'm very good at making habits.

Here's the secret, in two parts.

First, making habits is a skill like any other. If you've made a lot of intentional habits in the past, making a new one is easy. But if you're new to habit making, you need to start small.

Second, everyone focuses on the wrong part: the results that change will bring. Results are exciting, but distract you from the immense value of boring old repetition.

Think about the magazines in the grocery store checkout aisle. "Six weeks to a flat belly!" Programming boot camps promise their graduates all get good jobs.

What happens after though? Six weeks later, does your perfect body stay that way? What about that entry level job, after a few months, does it still feel good?

A real habit needs to be forever. That sounds intimidating, but forever is just made up of days. A real habit is one you repeat every day.

This reveals a paradox: change comes from repetition. Paradoxically, getting good at making new habits really depends more on maintaining the habits you already have.

So practice maintaining a habit. Start small. I highly recommend drinking water every day – it will help you make other habits. But whatever you start with, make it permanent before you move on to the next one.

Repetition is underrated. Whatever is worth doing is worth doing again.

I accidentally started reading the dictionary every night at 4 years old. So I've always been keenly attuned to the definitions of words and how people use them.

One set of terms I've struggled to define for years: political parties in the US.

Our two parties contain a wildly diverse mix of people. I've met people from both committed to improving the lives of everyone they can, community volunteers, warm and welcoming. And likewise, some people from both are clearly interested in the increase of brute power, crushing their opponents and benefitting personally from the results.

This leads some folks to say they're both the same. This clearly isn't correct. People align themselves with one party or another very strongly. So what is the difference between the two?

Tip O'Neill said "All politics are local", but he didn't go far enough. All politics are emotional. The political party someone aligns with has to do more with how they feel: do you believe the most important quality in government is to show strength, or caring?

Like so many important questions, the answer depends on how we deal with fear. Let me give you two examples.

Early in the pandemic, when the mask mandate relaxed to allow not wearing a mask outdoors, a lot of my liberal friends objected. Even when the decree came from medical authorities, the folks who usually begged everyone to 'follow the science!' balked at relaxing.

Last summer I saw a guy on a chopper motorcycle, racing down the highway, weaving between cars. Not only not wearing a helmet, he had flip-flops on his feet.

Some people deal with their fear of death by making a show of how unafraid they are, conspicuously flaunting it. Some people deal with their fear by making a show of all the precautions they take.

We all deal with fear differently, but we all have to deal with it.

This Election Day, please remember: your opponent is not a monster.