Lone Signal

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  • The Problem of Scale

    I’ve been awfully quiet lately, and that’s due, for the most part, to the nature of my current line of work. I’m immersed in one of the many campaign teams working towards the upcoming 2016 national and local elections, and confidentiality is among the defining attributes of my particular position. When something takes up most of your time but you aren’t cleared to discuss that “something” in detail, there’s little left to write about.

    That being said, here’s a thorny little problem that we’ve had to grapple with at work: scale.

    In coming up with protocols and policies for our campaign team, we’ve frequently had to remind ourselves that our solutions must be viable not only for the situation at hand, but for any similar ones that might arise in future. One key aspect to consider with this kind of big-picture deliberation is the nature of any and all groups that might be involved in such scenarios: we might be troubleshooting the concerns of a small group of 5 volunteers today, but any lasting policies we set down will have to work even if the parties concerned balloon to 50, 500, or five thousand-plus in number.

    As far as I can tell, it’s a common enough problem for any command structure, and perhaps more frequently in politics and government work.

    In the recently-concluded final PiliPinas 2016 presidential debate, for example, Mayor Rodrigo Duterte and ex-DILG Secretary Mar Roxas had a notable exchange regarding PhilHealth coverage in Davao City. Duterte claimed that nobody in Davao had received any PhilHealth benefits, decrying Roxas’ trumpeting of the institution’s increased reach; in response, Roxas cited the available data regarding PhilHealth beneficiaries in Davao City. (PhilHealth itself, in answer to Duterte’s allegations, also took the time to publish details regarding the benefits awarded to citizens of Davao.)

    The pomp and posturing of campaign debates aside, Duterte and Roxas present valid — if seemingly contradictory — perspectives that reveal how crucial a problem scale is in government work. Roxas, in citing the PhilHealth numbers, shows us the extent to which the government has addressed the challenge of offering affordable healthcare support for its citizens. Duterte, on the other hand, in drawing attention to the many more in Davao who have not received PhilHealth benefits, reminds us that these efforts, however impressive, might still stand to improve.

    And how could they not? PhilHealth, by its very nature as a public healthcare program, comes with an implicit responsibility to cater to the Philippine population as a whole. That’s massive ground to cover for any entity, and certainly not a promise anyone can completely live up to anytime soon. That’s also how Roxas and Duterte are both right — because with PhilHealth working on such a scale, it’s inevitable that some will slip through the cracks, even if coverage has improved overall.

    The problem of scale is a multifaceted thing.

    From our campaign team’s own experience, one such facet has to do with universality, or at least of universal applicability: one must find a way to ensure that solutions work even for larger groups encountering similar problems, at present or in future. Larger groups introduce more variables to account for, as well as a host of new possible consequences to bear in mind; each new instance of a similar problem will occur under circumstances that are at least slightly different from the current ones. Successfully surmounting this sub-problem of scale ensures efficiency, because then your team won’t have to waste time poring over essentially the same problem as it recurs in its many variations.

    Think of it this way: each problem is its own universe, encompassing a variety of disparate possible forms that all boil down to the same essential issue to be solved. A team saves time and energy when it can address that universe as a whole, instead of having to come up with solutions per planet.

    As the Roxas-Duterte scuffle over PhilHealth shows, another facet has to do with inclusivity. As you cast your net out to cover more instances of the problem you’re trying to solve, you have to ensure that you can and do address as many of those instances as possible (if not all of them, which is admittedly an almost impossible ask in any scenario). This has less of a temporal dimension than universality; in fact, a big chunk of the difficulty here might stem from simultaneity. In attempting to cover so many (similar) problems at once, how does one ensure that nothing gets overlooked? Answering this question will ensure a thoroughness of method that reduces the possibility of (chronic, and costly) failure on your part.

    Finally, some typical Election Day campaign team questions might shed light on a third aspect.

    Throughout the campaign period, for example, the party has been providing food for volunteers at each activity. For each area, this usually means each volunteer gets a packed meal, which was cooked and packaged by an assigned kitchen team and then delivered to the venue by a sub-group of that area’s logistics team. This kind of process easily serves, say, 50-100 volunteers out on the field at any one time, with meals only having to be delivered to at most 2-3 venues at the same time.

    This changes, of course, on election day.

    Consider a typical municipality with around, say, 200 clustered precincts, divided amongst roughly 60 polling places. Volunteers will be manning each of these polling places, and logistics teams will have to deliver meals to all of these volunteers across all these polling places by roughly the same set hour. It’s out of the question to ask one polling place to wait an hour while meals get delivered to a different polling place first; it’s also out of the question to let the kitchen team cut corners and possibly deliver subpar food.

    So our third facet seems to be: consistency, or the problem of ensuring that the quality of one’s solutions doesn’t suffer as one scales up their application. Is it a valid solution if one variation of the problem gets the prescribed attention and another gets a slipshod bandaid? Is it a valid solution if solving one instance of a problem requires giving another instance up to massive failure? This is not an issue of what sacrifices are necessary or acceptable; it is an issue of ensuring that one’s solutions remain solutions–proper, viable ones–regardless of the circumstances in which one is asked to carry them out. It is, perhaps, futile to expect 100% consistency all the time; however, this should not prevent us from aiming for that outcome anyway. One tricky thing about the problem of scale, after all: often, there are far too many things depending on one’s performance to allow for any degree of recklessness.

    So, to recap: scale has been a concept we have been struggling to deal with throughout the campaign, and I imagine this isn’t a novel problem for most other fields out there, either. From what I’ve seen so far, the problem of scale can be further broken down into three sub-questions: universality, inclusivity, consistency.

    • Universality asks us to consider how solutions can be applied to each variation of the problem that’s likely to occur.
    • Inclusivity then asks us to consider how those solutions can be delivered to all identified problem-variations to which they are applicable.
    • Consistency asks us to consider how the quality of those solutions can be sustained over the course of multiple and/or frequent and/or simultaneous applications.

    Each of these sub-questions must be successfully addressed if one is to solve problems on any large scale.

    I haven’t delved into the nuances of scale itself (e.g., how scale in the form of increased concurrent numbers presents different complications versus scale in the form of increased frequency of problem-variations’ occurrence), since a) that would make for a much longer post, and b) I admit I haven’t given that dimension of the concept much thought yet. It seems to be a promising line of further inquiry, though, so I’ll see if I can write out some thoughts or even initial impressions in the future.

  • Reboot

    I’ve decided on a more definite direction for this little blog, though I’m loath to erase the earlier blog posts on this site (few and scattered though they are). Those old posts will stay up; let’s tally those as the early steps in the endless process of a blog’s development.

    But what am I trying to turn this into, anyway?

    As early as the 15th century, people have kept commonplace books as a way not only to record but to digest ideas and influences. In what I’d like to believe is a continuation of this tradition, C. Wright Mills, writing on the subject of intellectual craftsmanship, stresses the value of keeping a file or journal for “systematic reflection.” Animating these practices is a simple but powerfully relevant idea: it is one thing to read1Or listen, or watch, or consume in any other way, as the case might be.; it is quite another to understand. These days especially, with the glut of information and material begging for attention and consumption, it’s easy to fall into the habit of skimming, of simply acquainting oneself with the surface of a concept or issue and calling that knowledge.

    But understanding, as I’ve come to realize, can’t be built from a collection of soundbites. People say that one can only give simple, clear explanations when there is full understanding of the large and complex issues to be explained; what we often fail to realize is that grabbing the catchiest points isn’t the same thing. I’d like this blog to be a document of the constant struggle to move from the latter to the former — of the attempt to probe deeper into ideas, concepts, matters that grab my attention, essentially.

    I am writing mostly for myself; as I noted above, the aim is to think out loud rather than to write for an audience. The fact remains, though, that this is all on a public blog. I don’t mind. Here’s hoping that sifting through my posts will also be worth some small fraction of any potential reader’s time.

  • Revisiting Netrunner

    In her Run Better tip on the Fetal AI website, Ohio-based competitive Android: Netrunner player Ellen Biscotti writes:

    Play your tournament decks consistently. … I usually play terribly the first few games with a new deck. After that, I play it pretty well, but it takes many games before I start to really feel confident with the nuances of a deck, like scoring windows, ice placement, or timing my runs. If I didn’t stick with decks, I would never know how well I could do with them.

    Since diving into earnest Netrunner play around a year ago, I’ve been playing the same factions and roughly the same decks. Biscotti’s advice agrees with my own experiences and underscores one of the things I love about the Living Card Game (LCG) format and Netrunner specifically: Unlike games like Magic: The Gathering, datapacks in Netrunner have standard contents, meaning players theoretically build from the same card pool. There are no “chase cards” or pockets of extraordinarily powerful/rare cards accessible only to players with the cash to spend, the occasional unavailability of certain data packs notwithstanding. As such, Netrunner game outcomes aren’t determined so much by specific cards or decks as they are by players’ piloting abilities; a beginner armed with a Tier 1 deck isn’t guaranteed a win against a Worlds Top 8 player who’s using subpar cards.

    I point this out because, as I’ve said earlier, I’ve been playing the same decks since starting Netrunner a year ago. This includes using an NBN deck that runs the Making News identity, which comes with the Android: Netrunner Core Set.

    NBN: Making News

    Agenda (9)
    3x AstroScript Pilot Program
    2x Priority Requisition
    2x Private Security Force
    2x Project Beale

    Asset (8)
    2x Daily Business Show
    2x Jackson Howard
    2x Marked Accounts
    2x PAD Campaign

    Upgrade (2)
    2x Red Herrings

    Operation (16)
    2x Closed Accounts
    3x Hedge Fund
    2x Midseason Replacements
    2x Psychographics
    2x Punitive Counterstrike ••••
    2x Scorched Earth ••••• •••
    3x Sweeps Week

    Barrier (3)
    3x Eli 1.0 •••

    Code Gate (6)
    3x Pop-up Window
    2x RSVP
    1x Tollbooth

    Sentry (5)
    3x Data Raven
    2x Guard

    15 influence spent (max 15)
    20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
    49 cards (min 45)
    Cards up to All That Remains

    Deck built on http://netrunnerdb.com

    NBN as a Corporation faction has been one of the powerhouses in the recent meta, especially with the rise of NEH: Near-Earth Hub (an ID from the Upstalk datapack) and the attendant kill decks. The release of Data & Destiny also introduced new NBN IDs, each of which has seen frequent use and even the development of certain archetypes (see: Spark Agency and its brand of econ denial). My point is that there’s a wealth of decent-to-good NBN IDs out there, and — due to my limited card pool — I’m not using any of them.

    Has that harmed my Netrunner experience?

    It’s 2015 and I’m still Making News

    No. In fact, my Corp deck has had a good win rate since I’ve started using it, which I take as an example of how forgiving Netrunner is to people who play despite not having all of the released cards. Mine is not an optimal deck list by any means. My core strategies – score easily advanceable agendas, and/or kill the Runner who tries to steal them – aren’t novel or groundbreaking. I’m inclined to think this deck would work better with, say, a few agenda swaps, Fast Track subbing for Red Herrings, maybe even just a switch from Making News to NEH. But I’ve still won many of my games with this deck, and I cite that as one of the reasons why I love Netrunner. It’s a well-designed game, and the proof is in how players are allowed their successes even without having all of the cards (and certainly not all of the “good” ones).

    Granted, I’ve mostly played against the 3-6 friends with whom I’ve established a weekly Netrunner group (this doubles as our meta), but I’d like to think this situation also illustrates the truth of Biscotti’s advice. Thanks to our regular games, my opponents have seen all of my deck’s tricks and have had the opportunity to tech against those tricks. I’ve managed to keep winning because, in that same period, I’ve also had the opportunity to suss out the nuances of playing this particular deck and figure out how to play it beyond relying merely on unknown/unexpected cards.

    There’s a healthy competitive scene in the metro, and I’ve actually been to a Game Night once, though only as a spectator. I’m hoping to change that this year. I’d like to take an NBN deck, and will likely be taking this one, give or take a few tweaks. The addition of newer datapacks and deluxe boxes to our group’s common card pool gives me more options for improving this particular list, so I’ll be working on that. Keeping Biscotti’s advice in mind, though, I don’t think there will be any fundamental changes to the deck’s core strategies in the near future.

  • The drip, drip, drip of existence

    I’ve recently started catching up to Season 3 of Elementary. The series remains great – brilliant, even, especially when we consider the self-assurance and deftness with which it ventures into topics and themes beyond the usual scope of weekly procedurals.

    The Eternity Injection, one of the episodes I watched yesterday, demonstrated this fearless precision well in a standout scene between Sherlock and Joan. Near the end of the episode, Joan asks Sherlock about his recent skipping of Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and Sherlock answers with an explanation that opens the way towards a thoughtful, nuanced dissection of addiction.

    The problem, it turns out, goes deeper than the run-in Sherlock had with a fellow NA attendee in a previous episode, and I’m glad the show actually went out of its way to acknowledge and highlight this. When he finally opens up, Sherlock laments the endless grind of sobriety, describing the process as the constant, tedious attempt to fix a leaky faucet. “Is this it?” he says, a question that encapsulates the underwhelming “triumph” of staying sober.

    I found the scene immensely powerful, as much for its emotional resonance as for its sheer objective accuracy. As someone dealing with mental illness – depression and severe anxiety, to be exact – I saw, in Sherlock’s despair, a clear reflection of many of my own struggles with getting better.

    There’s a euphoric moment – which, for me, occurred some time after I’d first started therapy – when you first notice significant improvements in your condition. I can actually get better, I’d thought then, staring blankly down the hall outside my therapist’s office, dazed from the strong and sudden blow of hope that hit me upside the head. “Better” is possible. Well. It’s not that the idea is wrong; it just glosses over the everyday realities that constitute “better.”

    The thing is, “better” is not an endpoint. It’s not a place you reach, one that you’re then guaranteed to occupy for the rest of your life. As I’ve discovered (and wanted to cry about many times), “getting better” is a long, often difficult, certainly tedious crawl, and there’s no definite end to it. There’s no point where you can plop yourself down and stop trying, content that you will never be at risk of anxiety attacks or depression again.

    Staying “better” will never be completely effortless. I developed good routines, but these will need adjustment as my circumstances change; some days, no matter how closely I stick to my “game plans” — all these little measures that add up to help keep me healthy — things still go wrong and I find myself unable to breathe, wholly paralyzed by a mind racing away from me at the speed of frenzied, burning thought.

    This doesn’t mean the effort to “get better” is futile, of course. There is immeasurable value in trying to keep hold of the ground you’ve gained, as there is in striving, always, to gain a little more.

    But sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Sometimes “better” isn’t that first joyous, expansive burst of possibility, that realization that you can have a future that is actually worth looking forward to. Sometimes “better” is having just enough energy to roll out of bed when you couldn’t even bring yourself to consider it before – and of course, sometimes moments like those don’t feel like they’re enough, don’t feel like they ought to qualify as improvement. And sometimes, as happens to me quite often, you’re doing okay, but you realize that you still need to perform all these dull, tedious, repetitive tasks, just to ensure the possibility of “doing okay” tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.

    That’s when it becomes tempting to ask, “Is this it?” That’s when it becomes tempting to, as Sherlock puts it, surrender to the drip, drip, drip of existence.

    What I found impressive about The Eternity Injection, beyond Sherlock’s eloquent and strikingly precise description of this struggle, was the characters’ – and the show’s – acknowledgement that there are no easy resolutions to this problem.

    Faced with Sherlock’s answer, Joan at first tries to offer answers, reassurance: “You have your work. You have me. You’re alive.” But as Sherlock points out, these sources of reassurance won’t always carry the same potency. One can remain appreciative of these things, even as one reaches the point where these things have been turned to so frequently that they lose all meaning.

    Well, what do you say to a problem like that, then? I love how perfect Joan’s response was: simply asking if there’s anything else she can do to help, and then taking a step back, to just be there.

    From my own experiences with friends and loved ones, there’s often this expectation (an insistence, even) that there is a ready answer just waiting to be found, some perspective or other that one need only discover and cleave to for this problem to be happily and permanently resolved. But it’s true, it’s not always as easy as, say, simply reminding yourself of the good, fulfilling things in life. Because who hasn’t done that, who hasn’t attempted this way or that to save themselves in those precarious moments of possible relapse? Receiving the same attempted answers from others rarely changes these answers’ effectiveness, or lack thereof. As Sherlock and Joan’s exchange illustrated so well, sometimes the best “answer” you can receive in such a situation isn’t a frantic search for reassurances, but a simple, quiet affirmation that being well is an unending process that you will nonetheless never go through alone.

  • Words and Phrases (Not Quite) Legally Defined

    “Words are the currency of law,” our professor said, capping off our block’s introduction to legal history. Who gets what, when, and how — that, he said, was the meaning of power, and it was a meaning that law could write and change with mere words.

    I was riveted. As a recent literature graduate just two weeks into an exploratory semester of law, hearing the field cast in the frame of language felt like the answer I thought it would take months, if not years, to find.

    Consequently, I left law school soon after.

    In the days that followed, a good bit of my time was spent explaining why. Growing up, I had a steady diet of words. I was active in campus journalism; I dabbled in creative writing; my mom regaled everyone with stories of the ridiculous methods I used just to read books in the shower. In college, I studied literature, and I loved everything from the endless readings to the printer-killing papers. The natural next step, people often told me, was law school. It made sense: law is a field built on words. Words, in a way, were my life; but as I have come to learn, the reverse is truer, for me as for everyone else.

    Our lives speak for us, too. Without saying a thing, someone who rises from poverty to become a titan of industry tells us of hope, grit, and perseverance, just as college dropouts who go on to change the landscape of technology tell us of innovation and possibility. When I was a kid, people would ask me if I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer. Many children, at one point or another, get asked the same. “A doctor, so I can heal others,” we might have said; or, “A lawyer, so I can defend people.” Often, though, what those questions really want to know is: how will your life speak of achievement, of distinction, of success?

    Medicine or law? Engineering or nursing? College or searching for a job? Whatever the options, to pick one or the other (or to select something different altogether) is to communicate your circumstances, beliefs, values, and aspirations in distinct and specific ways. Word choice matters, whether we’re writing office memos or the stories of our lives. And hearing law characterized as words that day in class, I knew—those were not the words I wanted to write my life with.

    Choices, like any language, carry their share of clichés: familiar, established expressions that we can use to convey certain notions or impressions with ease. In writing their lives, some people deploy these phrases deliberately, consciously, purposefully. That’s thoughtfulness and self-awareness, and that’s worth admiring. But many others, myself included, don’t put as much thought into it. Instead we punch in these ready-made phrases, driven by an unexamined belief in their certainty and value.

    Clichés are clichés because they are everywhere; they are everywhere because they worked well enough to have been accepted as the default. But that, I’ve learned, is what makes clichés so dangerous: they’ve become automatic. They’ve become the options and paths that we can (and often do) take without thinking; they’ve become the easiest way to pad our autobiographies without having these mean anything to us, let alone to anyone else. In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, the author David Foster Wallace discussed the notion of “default settings,” noting that these were insidious not because they were evil or sinful, but because they were unconscious. This same lack of deliberate engagement blinds us to our potentially habitual surrender to the automatic, and leaves us with a vocabulary of choices that has been reduced to the most limited of entries.

    “What is the ratio?” another professor once asked us, trying to steer our block to a more thorough discussion of the rationale for a court decision. “What is the ratio?” He’d paused, looked out the window, and grinned. “‘What is the ratio?’ When I die, I’ll have them put that on my tombstone.” It’s a memory I’m going to carry with me far beyond the bounds of law school, for two reasons.

    First, it’s a good reminder of what a life written through deliberate choice sounds like. Here was someone who chose, every day, to teach students how to think, no matter how vexing the task often got. That is, here was someone who knew what message he wanted to send, and who affirmed, every day, his choice of how to say it. Whether or not our professor did put the question on his tombstone, it was something that his decisions and actions would continue to ask long after he’d carried them out. In a way, we are all our own epitaphs.

    Second, there is the question itself. What is the ratio? Why do our lives say what they say, and why do they say it in that way? It’s difficult, if not impossible, to answer this with complete certainty. But to even ask at all is to recognize that our lives can convey something valuable.

    I know I want to build a life that speaks of service, honor, and excellence. Others have done and are choosing to do so through law, as others will also choose to do in the future. But I came to law carried along by my default settings, and no one can communicate service, honor, or excellence by simply living out a cliché. After all, if we want our lives to speak with fluency, meaning, and conviction, then our work doesn’t stop at finding something worthwhile to say. It’s equally important to consider how we choose to say it. What we convey and embody, and how: that, it seems, is the meaning of character—and as my brief stint in law school helped show me, it is a meaning that demands to be written and shaped by choices made in nothing less than the grand manner.

  • Running by myself

    Most people in my neighborhood equate a good fitness regimen with waking up bright and early. Peering out the window at 6 or 6:30 AM, it isn’t rare to see people dressed in singlets and shorts walking back home from the nearby track. Such early starts make sense, though: many of these people are in their thirties, forties, or older, and a good number of them likely have jobs and other responsibilities slated for the rest of the day.

    Recently my dad has been trying to establish a healthier lifestyle for himself, and he’s been inviting me to join him on his walks. What ends up happening is that he walks out the door at 6 in the morning and I wake up just in time to welcome him back at around 7 or so. He often ribs me for this over breakfast, but that’s okay; I think having something to be smug about helps keep him on track. 🙂 I draw the line when he starts insinuating that my inability to work out in the early hours is a major flaw in my fitness routine, though. Just because I’m not sweating before the sun rises doesn’t mean my routine is any worse than anyone else’s.

    An early-morning routine has never worked for me. Mostly this is because I don’t always sleep as early as that schedule requires; if I want to get enough sleep and still be up for a workout at 5 in the morning, I’ve got to be snoozing by 9 PM, and this almost never happens. Instead, I work out in the late morning, afternoon, or evening. On the days I’ve alloted for strength training, I do bodyweight exercises before I head out for lunch — and as for cardio, I run in the late afternoon or evening, before I buckle down on the work I need to do for the next day.

    This makes for some great moments, like those times when I’ve got the glare of a coming sunset in my eyes and a cool breeze messing up my hair.

    Because the regular crowd are usually done by morning, I often have the track to myself. The silence is one of my favorite parts of an afternoon run: there’s something soothing about hearing the steady rhythm of your own feet on the track and feeling as though you’re moving through a world that’s content to stay still and let you pass.

    A lot of people have compared running to meditation, or found strong connections between the two. When I’m out running at five in the afternoon, chasing after the deepening orange glow on the horizon, that’s when these ideas click for me. Running can be an energizing way to kick off the day, and sometimes it does that for me when my schedule permits. But a run can also be a comforting, calming thing — a balm for a bad day, or a gentle close to a good one. I’m thankful to have experienced that side of running so early in the program, and I’m looking forward to the days ahead.